This is a magnificent article. I love the ethnographic nature of it and how it's rife with lessons for today's Wikipedia and beyond. Thanks for your hard work, Legoktm. Nardog (talk) 21:27, 31 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
In regards to the "Missed opportunities" section talking about how the community pushed back on a proposed user interface change... I'm glad that our website doesn't have frequent user interface changes. A lot of websites get a major UI overhaul every couple of years, probably for marketing/sales reasons, and oftentimes I don't think the changes are an improvement. For example, websites with floating stuff everywhere (toolbars, cookie notices, social share buttons). Sometimes it's good to stick with what is tried and true. –Novem Linguae (talk) 01:52, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
These social media share buttons are about tracking people across the internet—see this article. Similarly much of the floating stuff is about tricking people into watching adverts by blurring the line between content and advertising. The simplicity of Wikipedia's UI is not something I would want to change, but the outdated 2000s-era style is something I think we desperately need to update. Nothing crazy, just a cleaner, more modern look. The WMF's Desktop Improvements plan above seems ideal. — Bilorv (talk) 11:38, 3 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This was great, thanks from me as well. Minor That Guy™ note: The initial version contained the contradictory statement, "In general bots are generally frowned [upon]." Not contradictory, merely redundant. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 14:52, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think the idea is that a "bot policy" which says "(mostly) don't use bots" is contradictory. But I agree that the sentence makes the reader stumble. And it doesn't actually seem contradictory in the abstract to have a "bot policy" forbidding bots -- what else would you call a policy that forbids bots, a "not bot policy"? :) Perhaps "...contained the disarming statement that..." would be a better way of flagging the tension in the policy? C. Scott Ananian (talk) 14:01, 2 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Cscott: Oh, if that's what it was referring to... actually, then my objection becomes even stronger, because the only contradiction is being injected by the after-the-fact application of the term "bot policy". Which, if the policy is "no bots", then as you say it wasn't a bot policy — it was an editing policy. One that generally discouraged users from creating software to perform fully-autonomous/automated edits (i.e. bots). While supporting software-assisted manual editing (e.g. w/ tools like Twinkle), as long as each action was under direct user control. ...That's how I'd frame it. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 18:38, 2 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
