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ckoerner's comments

ckoerner | 2 years ago | on: Welcome to Wikifunctions

Representation matters. Many people are not represented in the worlds knowledge, much less the creation of it.

ckoerner | 3 years ago | on: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

At some point the message has to change. It has to become something a little more like: Look, so far we've done this which you thought was cool. Now we want to do X, Y and Z. Will you support us?

I think this is a perfectly valid idea and would encourage you to lead with this sort of approach in trying to get the Foundation to change strategy. It's straightforward and constructive. Pointing out all the ways the fundraising is bad is not nearly as useful as suggesting ways to approach it differently and improve it.

(I normally don't talk about Fundraising stuff as a volunteer, but the Meta thread where I was pinged led me here).

ckoerner | 3 years ago | on: Poll of Wikipedians concludes: Wikimedia fundraising emails are misleading

>they have never written a Wikipedia article. Some can't even figure out how to leave a talk page message, and they couldn't tell you which side of a diff shows the new version of an article and which the old.

None of those things are necessary qualities of an organizational leader. This is like saying the CEO of Adobe should be competent in how to use Photoshop.

This criticism, like much of yours over the years, attempts to simplify a complex situation, of which you know very little given your limited perspective, into a soundbite to get attention and garner community affectation. Wikimedia needs better critics.

ckoerner | 4 years ago | on: FAA releases TRUST: Free online training required to fly drones recreationally

I'm on the opposite end of experience than you and find a drone is often unpredictable in its flight. I just got a small (DJI Mini 2) drone in March and have been learning and flying as a recreational flyer as often as weather and time permits. According to the logs I have flown a mere 8 hours and 40 odd miles over 40 some flights. This small drone is easy to move quickly in nearly all directions while having 4 swiftly rotating blades that do not care what they touch and with no easy way to avoid. Wind gusts over 20 mph (easy to find over even just 75ft) can cause the craft to struggle to control, much less move in the direction intended.

Not to mention while I paid the smart sum of $600 for my kit (a high bar for many to spend on getting started in a hobby), DJI now has an even more approachable model at $299. Making the ability to get into the hobby more accessible is great, but it does come with a greater risk of even well-intentioned but under-educated people (or just knuckleheads) sending a drone up for a quick flight and smashing into someone/something without even reading the manual.

I'm a pretty cautious guy. I took a MSF course before buying a motorcycle, wear a helmet and gear, etc. I was very careful on my first few flights with my drone, but even then managed to crash into a stationary bird house. All this to say I am happy to take a simple test to prove to myself, much less those around me, that I know what the heck I'm doing and to keep myself and others safe because these things are very different from model aircraft and most consumer electronics that include a camera and gyroscopes. :)

ckoerner | 8 years ago | on: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia

>And the post seems extremely proud, and self-congratulatory about it.

Well, yeah. Doing anything successfully at the scale of Wikipedia is worthy of some praise - and I say that as a US midwesterner - a culture not exactly known as the epitome of hubris. :)

You might claim I have Stockholm syndrome or something since I worked with the team that developed this feature, but the discussion you highlight did have valid feedback. The process for respecting community governance and developing consensus is more complicated than any one person could imagine. It is frustrating and imperfect. Folks at the foundation like myself are trying to do better in how we approach, work with, and deploy software changes. I agree too that it took a long time to develop, but that's not on any one single community's shoulders.

For instance, after doing due diligence we approached the English community again earlier this month and the result of that discussion was quite boring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscel...

For a technical example that lead to the time it took, the team looked at how we were generating the previews and saw an opportunity to improve them. Previously we tried to parse a bunch of wikitext with a list as long as my arm of exclusions and edge cases. Then the team figured out a way to return HTML summaries from the source article. Not just something useful for this feature and a huge improvement to how information is rendered (like math formulas). Refactoring the code and implementing a new API endpoint took time.

I hope this doesn't come across as too argumentative, I wanted to provide an alternative perspective from someone who works daily with product teams and communities within the Wikimedia movement.

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