Deskana (WMF)

Welcome!

Hello, DGarry (WMF), and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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Congratulations on your hire, Dan :) Steven Zhang (talk) 11:07, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Steven. This should be an interesting experience... --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 17:03, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I often suggest to new starters that they keep a diary of their first six weeks. Some people find they understand problems and potential solutions with amazing clarity early on, and then they lose sight of them once they get enmeshed in groupthink and firefighting. If only they had kept a note of their first impressions, they wouldn't have had to rediscover them so painfully six months later. Of course, a diary is only useful if you're working in an, errrr, interesting role that involve a lot of conflicting demands, maybe from naturally argumentative people whose status and prior experience aren't immediately apparent. No, really—some jobs are like that! Anyway, good luck - Pointillist (talk) 22:11, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Question

Hey Dan. Is admin tools development something that you'll be working on directly? (I know they were looking at hiring someone to do some stuff, and it would also encompass the admin tools work). Steven Zhang (talk) 14:02, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi Steven. Right now I'm working on auth systems, specifically OAuth. You could look at this page for background reading, but that page is out of date at present. Admin tools improvements does fall within my remit as product manager for platform, and obviously it's somoething I have a personal interest in given my background, but we've agreed to mostly keep me on a single project for now (plus triage of other problems that pop up) while I learn the ropes. Hopefully that answers your question. Thanks! --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 14:11, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

SUL finalisation

Hi. I can probably find time to help you with SUL finalisation, at least in making a high-level timeline. It's going to be a slow process (probably about a year). --MZMcBride (talk) 05:38, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi MZMcBride. Thanks for your kind offer. James Forrester is helping me quite extensively with this at the minute, so I don't need any additional help right now. Please do keep an eye on the project, and I hope you don't mind if I reach out to you if I need help in the future. Thanks again! --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 11:44, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Right... that's part of my concern. James F. had a series of premature roll-outs this year that went over very badly with a number of Wikimedia wiki communities. As I posted here in August 2013, the SUL finalisation process needs to be managed incredibly carefully to avoid really upsetting users. It will take many months to execute the process properly and fairly. Please let me know when there's a high-level timeline of the proposed process for review. The timeline that James F. originally wrote at Meta-Wiki was unacceptably short and would have resulted in thousands of angry users. --MZMcBride (talk) 13:00, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

@MZMcBride: We are talking about the forced renaming of ~ 4 million accounts; the idea that we won't have thousands of angry users after this process, whether it takes an hour or an æon, is grossly optimistic. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:09, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Jdforrester: Sure, but it's about mitigation. For example, some people will be upset at losing their preferred account name, but they'll be much less upset if they're first given the option to rename themselves in the months prior to forcible renaming. Part of the general communications problems between the Wikimedia Foundation and the active editing community is a lack of respect and forewarning with changes such as this. The original timeline would have been disastrous and I've seen no indication that all sides recognize this, which is pretty worrying. A new timeline should be developed with clear goals and objectives and without rushing any particular step. There's a concern that in an effort to push (arguably) dependent features forward, the Wikimedia Foundation might try to push SUL finalisation forward at a faster pace than is appropriate. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:39, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

@MZMcBride: Absolutely, though they've had 7 years to request a rename. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:09, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Jdforrester: Err, you're a bit off-base here. Global renames still aren't implemented, so if you want to rename your account across Wikimedia wikis, it usually requires hundreds of individual requests. To say nothing of the fact that it also requires thousands of database rows to be updated and users can't rename themselves. The entire process is completely broken. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:56, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

To my knowledge, there has not been any global notification to all affected users. Some of the users may be happily unaware of the SUL conflict and might not have heard of SUL at all. Users who are unaware of SUL might not have seen any need to request a rename. When users are notified of these issues, there will probably be lots of requests at WP:CHU (and equivalent pages on other projects), so it is also a good idea to monitor those pages and postpone forced renames until the number of rename requests has gone down significantly. If people are informed of the issue and are given a chance to request a rename themselves, they might end up being less upset. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:26, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

@MZMcBride: It is indeed about damage control, and it will take months. Flipping the "force renames!" switch out of nowhere is not on the cards. I'm still getting to grips with what's available to me, so I'll let you know as I learn more and a timeline forms. Thanks! --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 20:18, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Is there a tracking bug for getting this all done? If there is any code that still needs to be written I'm pretty sure there are enough devs who want to see this finally done :) Legoktm (talk) 21:05, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm: Sure, there's bugzilla:35707 and a bunch of related bugs. However all of the current bugs forget to focus on the fact that doing renames currently is really expensive when it really needn't be. We need to abolish the *_user_text columns for registered users. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:58, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

@MZMcBride and Legoktm: I think refactoring the revisions table, though a hugely worthy goal, is out of scope for this particular issue (and is likely to take 5-10 years to fix - it's not "hard" coding, but it's a hugely taxing DB schema change to push through, though allocating IDs for IPs would be a little tricky). Thought there might be a bug about this, but I couldn't find one with a few minutes' searching, sadly. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 23:29, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Jdforrester, Legoktm: I can't imagine it would take five to ten years. What would you be doing for five to ten years, exactly? Yes, some parts of MediaWiki would break, but it's not as though we can't search through the code and fix the issues. We can retain the current schema, I think. Just use "NULL" for a registered user's rev_user_text and store the IP address for anons.

MediaWiki's infrastructure is already built to support anons and registered users simultaneously. The mind-bogglingly part is that we continue to store the user name with each revision, requiring thousands of table rows to be updated with many renames. I would like to think that this architectural issue is part of the reason global renames have taken so long to be implemented (i.e., nobody really wants to build a super-system around the current rename system...), though it's probably not actually the reason for the delay. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:15, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't know exactly how the database works, but keep in mind that some human edits are assigned to user 0 instead of the correct user ID. For example, this edit by me is assigned to user 0 because it was imported using el:Special:Import before I had an account on Greek Wikipedia. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:26, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

Stefan2, I don't know how the database works either, so in the interests of learning a bit more, could you tell me how you know that edit is assigned to user 0? Anyway, that kind of thing doesn't really concern me too much. Our purpose is to make sure that, in the future, everyone has a unified account so that they have consistency and registration across all wikis, ensure a more smooth user experience, and will (amongst other things) allow us to develop tools that can assume that someone has an account on another wiki, say Commons, without having to verify that. Fixing minor errors left behind by the old system isn't too pressing. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 09:41, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

You can find the user account number of a particular edit by using Special:Export. The exported XML file will list the user account numbers for all edits. --Stefan2 (talk) 09:57, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Great. Thanks for the info Stefan2. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 12:45, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Hello.

Hello. This is a second test of the MassMessage delivery system. Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 23:29, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello!

Hi! Legoktm 02:37, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Note

• Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Category_pages_will_be_movable_soon

I've been considering contacting wmf staff, and while there are probably others I should send a note to as well, you're the lucky first one, merely because you commented at VP technical a moment ago : )

Once the current 404 situation is dealt with (it obviously has priority : ) - Please read over the threads. I realise it's lengthy (I only started commenting about 2/3 in), but I think it's important.

Thank you. - jc37 21:01, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi Jc37. I'm unclear what specifically you're wanting me to do (other than just read the discussion). Can you please clarify? Thanks. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 21:11, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi, and thank you for your response. I guess I presumed that you'd understand my concerns when you'd finished reading.

As for what to do, I honestly don't know, as (from what I understand at least) who has authority/responsibility.etc. over what, when we start talking about between wikis, is at times shaky at best. But fait accompli just doesn't seem the right way to handle this. Thank you again for looking into this. - jc37 21:43, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Jc37, I understand the concerns that people are raising, but I'm not clear what you're asking me to actually do in my position as a product manager. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 21:58, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Oh, I see what you were asking.

You have the (dubious? : ) - honour of having an "wmf" after your user name. You are also someone I think it is safe to say is a Wikipedian who has been trusted by the community. (Incidentally, I didn't notice at first that you are also Deskana. For transparency, I should probably link to this, from all the way back to those days of yesteryear also known as 2007 Which is, I think, the last time I remember even talking with you : )

So besides your thoughts, basically, I'm not sure which direction to go with this. Jumping up and yelling "I'm telling mommy" isn't my goal, so much as having more eyes, more experienced eyes on this.

And afaik, fait accompli isn't how we've done these things in the past, and the few times it has happened it was clear that it shouldn't have been done that way. (I cited a couple examples.)

If this was an implementation of a deletion close, I go to DRV, an RfC close, to WP:AN, behaviour issue (after several steps) ultimately to arbcom. Where do I go when the community itself is being ignored? The suggested arguement that we need an rfc to overturn a WP:BOLD action (coder implementation) seems backward and counter to the rather longstanding WP:BRD methods we do here.

So I'm not sure what to do next. What are your thoughts? Both on the substance at AN, and on this? - jc37 23:55, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome button?

I've just thanked someone and their response was to post to my talk page to say "You're welcome. (If Wikipedia had a "You're welcome" button, it'd be a lot more cordial and a lot easier than this.)". Any thoughts? Dougweller (talk) 14:42, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Hey Dougweller. You should direct any feedback about our notifications to Danny Horn, the Product Manager for Core Features. He's responsible for notifications. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:35, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. How do I contact him? I found this] but no signs the account has ever been used. Dougweller (talk) 06:41, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

@Dougweller: You can send an email to dhornwikimedia.org. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 15:15, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Done, thanks. Dougweller (talk) 15:20, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Posting to archives

Hi; re your comment "Very well, I'll go to all the trouble of unarchiving this just to add a single comment for posterity's sake" - the thing is, your post to that archive had the effect that Lbertolotti (talk · contribs) then also posted there, clearly in response to your post. This is not something that we wish to encourage. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:33, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Re this, your initial comment would have benefited the OP, never mind posterity. It was clear their issue was not resolved yet at VPT. They weren't aware that your comment had been added to the archive until I happened to notice it and direct the OP to it in this ongoing thread on my talk page. It didn't occur to me that they would add comments there, maybe it should have. Thanks for helping them by restoring the thread. Cheers,―Mandruss ☎ 16:57, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Survey Invite

I'm working on a study of political motivations and how they affect editing. I'd like to ask you to take a survey. The survey should take 5 minutes. Your survey responses will be kept private. Our project is documented at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_%2B_Politics.

Survey Link: http://uchicago.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_80J3UDCpLnKyWTH?Q_DL=eYcEJhpD4guKGZT_80J3UDCpLnKyWTH_MLRP_b19aWxQPIbrO7C5&Q_CHL=gl

I am asking you to participate in this study because you are a frequent editor of pages on Wikipedia that are of political interest. We would like to learn about your experiences in dealing with editors of different political orientations.

Sincere thanks for your help! Porteclefs (talk) 20:56, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Hi!

I'm testing a gadget for you. --TestAccount1782 (talk) 15:52, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

not sure why

but it occurred to me you might be interested in the contents of this man's books. Nocturnalnow (talk) 21:37, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

@Nocturnalnow: Thanks! Was there some particular thing you thought stood out in there? I'm having trouble seeing a connection. :-) --Deskana (WMF) (talk) 08:28, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

The connection is not direct but rather from a holistic and interest expansion perspective. I noticed your interest in mathematics and assume, perhaps wrongly, that many people, perhaps you, who are interested in mathematics are also interested in critical thinking and thought experiments, which this particular author, "economist, historian, and writer", "Sutton studied at the universities of London, Göttingen, and California and received his D.Sc. from the University of Southampton. He was an economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution from 1968 to 1973." was prioritizing all of his adult life, which led to a final book in 1983 (which he put into the public domain...note, there is another follow-up book, also in the Public Domain, by a protégé which follows/continues Sutton's work right up to and including 2018 as well as covers a preceding period which includes the U.S.A. Civil War). Sutton's final major work has a preface he wrote, just below, which might be as enticing to you as it was to me: i.e.:

"After 16 books and 25 years in basic research I thought I'd heard it all ... the world was a confused mess, probably beyond understanding and certainly beyond salvation - and there was little 'l could do about it. Back in 1968 my Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development was published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In three substantial volumes I detailed how the West had built the Soviet Union. However, the work generated a seemingly insoluble puzzle - why have we done this? Why did we build the Soviet Union, while we also transferred technology to Hitler's Germany? Why does Washington want to conceal these facts? Why have we boosted Soviet military power? And simultaneously boosted our own? In subsequent books, the Wall Street series, I added more questions - but no answers. I had more or less arrived at the conclusion that there was no rational answer that could be proven. Then a year or so ago I received an eight-inch batch of documents... and a formerly fuzzy world became crystal clear. The book you will read here is a combined version of a series reporting on this research. Each volume builds on the previous volume in a logical step-by-step process. These volumes will explain why the West built the Soviets and Hitler; why we go to war, to lose; why Wall Street loves Marxists and Nazis; why the kids can't read; why the Churches have become propaganda founts; why historical facts are suppressed, why politicians lie and a hundred other whys. This series is infinitely more important than the original Western Technology series on technological transfers. If I have a magnum opus, this is it. ANTONY C. SUTTON Phoenix, Arizona July 30, 1983"

I read his last book first, but if I had it to do over again, I'd start with his first book, "Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development (in three volumes)". Nocturnalnow (talk) 14:34, 15 August 2018 (UTC)