Talk:Philip Greenspun illustration project/Round 1

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TODO[edit]

--pfctdayelise 13:57, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

About the delay.[edit]

So, it would not be hard to notice that PGIP was announced to the community in November 2007 and it is now August 2008. You may well want to know what took so long. Well, the delay is my fault, and the reasons are nothing too surprising:

  • I overestimated my own technical ability. (Originally I planned to configure a bugtracker myself. After a few months I realised I didn't really have the expertise to do this. River offered to host the project on the toolserver's issue tracking system, JIRA. This is not ideal for a few reasons, but at least it meant we could move forward.)
  • I underestimated how hard it was to assess requests. It turns out assessing requests is fairly complicated. People often don't do the basic research, e.g. searching Commons, checking interwiki link pages, searching US .gov sites (this is good for physics/chemistry). Half the trouble is even understanding what the request is for, since I'm not an expert in, well, nearly anything.
  • I underestimated the volume of requests. I thought people would jump at a chance and I would get dozens and dozens of requests. I got a few dozen, but not as many as I thought.
  • I wanted the first round to have requests that were "worthy" of the project. I skipped lots of requests that I thought were too trivial or too niche. Since this is a new thing for WMF to try, I didn't want it to be made a laughing stock. Maybe I was overly cautious here; maybe not.
  • I didn't delegate enough. I decided to keep the final word in too many parts of this. Well, a classic mistake that's easy to see in hindsight.
  • I let all these snowball and then freaked out a bit and tried to make it go away by ignoring it.

So I just wanted to say, I'm sorry. But now we are finally here. Let's see if we can't do something cool after all. Happy illustrating. --pfctdayelise 13:25, 10 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In short, you are human. WAS 4.250 14:52, 10 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. --pfctdayelise 02:29, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]