Thread:Rastislav TrainStation/@comment-15636815-20131129224916/@comment-15636815-20131201221139

I don't know whether you'll read this or not. I don't know whether you care anymore about anything I have to say. I'll just write it, and whatever happens, happens.

First and foremost, I screwed up.

Why? Ultimately, the cause was a lack of communication. That may be difficult to believe, given the size of the blog thread for the Extensions page, yet I assure you, that is what happened. We (yes, "we") failed to communicate with each other on the things that led to me misunderstanding something and blowing up about it.

1. Let me begin at the place where you ended. I do not now--nor have I ever--thought of the Extensions page as "my page" or its revision as "my project". In the corporate world, projects work better if one person leads and coordinates (the project, not necessarily the people). The same is true in Wikia. You stated that the Extensions page is the most complex page on this Wiki. If that's true, then consider the utter chaos that would ensue if everyone working on the project simply edited the live page with whatever ideas they had. It would be very difficult to tell what was happening, and the potential for conflicting edits is horrifying.

Even if all the work happened in a user sandbox, as we're doing with this page, the effect would be similar. To prevent this, major rework projects on this and other Wikis tend to have one person who is the project lead. Typically, this is an informal title, and no one ever uses it, yet everyone knows that ideas and feedback should happen where that person is sure to see them. In most such cases, the project lead is the person who stepped up and said, "Why don't we fix ?", and that person typically makes all the edits on the working page. Once the page goes live, then everyone edits, as usual.

No one questioned Katat0nyx when he took the lead on redesigning the locomotive template or accused him of owning the page. No one questioned Mhommer when he took the lead on adding Game Updates information to pages everywhere, or accused him of owning that project. In both of those cases, one person stepped up, produced an initial product, requested feedback, and responded to that feedback, all while remaining the primary author of the working material.

Exactly the same is true with me and the Extensions page. Many people noticed the need to update not only the data, but also the page itself. Only one person stepped up and said, "Okay, let's do this", and produced an initial working page. I never announced, "I am the Project Lead for the Extensions page, and I'll be the only one making edits to the page until it goes live." Why? Because I didn't need to. It just happened naturally. In fact, I never even thought of myself in those terms. I thought of myself simply as a guy who saw a need and decided to fill it for the good of the community.

I also never announced, "I will accept no feedback during this project, and every idea on the final page will be my own." Why? Because that's not the way Wikia works. Not only did I never announce that, I never thought it. The evidence of this fact is abundant. How many things on the working page came from your ideas? How many things there are things that I said I would prefer not to see, but included because it was better for the page and for the community? One good example is your idea to right-align text in columns that usually have numbers.

A better example is the use of horizontal lines in dual-cost rows. I liked them. You liked them. Katat0nyx didn't like them. I removed them. I got feedback from a non-user. He didn't like them. Now they are gone, and we made other changes that removed all of the confusion those rows created. If the statement, "it is clearly visible that you intend to have the Extensions revision project only for yourself" were true, text in numeric columns still would be left-aligned, and those horizontal lines still would be there. Since those things (and a bunch of others that weren't my ideas) DID change, I think it's extremely safe to say that the "clearly visible" statement is clearly untrue.

You also wrote, "I hope that some day you eventually discover that what really matters in learning you like so much is having feed-back, discussion and flow of ideas". This statement implies that you read my profile page. It also shows that you didn't understand it. Discussion and the flow of ideas are two of the most important things in the world to me. I have a roommate who absolutely refuses to discuss things and share ideas. By his own admission, almost 100% of his conversations involve nothing more than "small talk". He asked to be my friend, and I spent a day attempting to converse with him. At the end of the day, I informed him that all of my friends became my friends in part because they enjoy discussing things with me, and that he was welcome to be my roommate. I thought I made this clear on my profile page, so I cannot even imagine what makes you think I see no value in feeedback.

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Wow, that part is longer than I expected.

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As for the rest, I'm going to skip around a bit instead of addressing everything from top to bottom.

2. You mentioned more than once that I was interested in getting the new page live ASAP. Two things about that.
 * Well, yes. Of course. Aren't you? Otherwise, what's the point? The live page is full of unconfirmed and missing data, and it's messy to use. The sooner we get the new page up and running, the better for the community.
 * From what I can tell, you had this 1-2-3 order in your head of how things should go. You were on step 2, and I was working step 3. I even complained a couple of times about my lack of progress on step 3 stuff. This gave you the impression that I was trying to rush the project just to get something up there. What you didn't know was, I did not skip step 2. I skipped steps 1 AND 2, because I didn't know they were there.

You're a programmer. That's what you do. To you, steps 1 and 2 are as natural as breathing. I am not a programmer. I have a tiny (**TINY**) bit of experience in programming, and I learned Wikitext fairly quickly, but I'm not accustomed to this big process you had in mind. I tackled this project the only way I knew how: I dove in and started building it. The biggest thing on the current live page is the data, so, guess what? I started transferring data. After this, you began step 1. I was a bit annoyed with this, but only because I believed that the working page should be complete and ready to go before making any of it live. The page should go from old to new in one huge edit. I viewed your input as valuable, yet I sometimes got frustrated with what I considered to be interruptions.

Whenever I could, I continued my work on step 3. Meanwhile, you started step 2. Since step 2 is the biggest, longest, and most difficult, and because it includes most of the changes from the old page to the new page, the "interruptions" were more extreme. I got almost nothing accomplished on step 3 for over a week, because I was dealing with all the issues you kept raising. You were doing things right, because steps 1 and 2 are important and necessary. If done well, steps 1 and 2 can save huge amounts of time during step 3. It didn't occur to you to say, "Hey!  Stop!  Wait a minute!  Why are you working on step 3?  What about steps 1 and 2?", probably because they come naturally to you, and possibly because you assumed that I was aware of them and chose to skip them. Had I known about them in advance, or had you said, "Hey, I realise you're not a programmer.  I've found that this 1-2-3 process works well", I would have recognised their value and happily would have engaged in that process with you.

You wrote, "It's a pity you decided to hold on more straighforward approach and rush things from step 2 so much." As you can see by now, I made no such decision. The word, decision, implies a choice--and I never had one. It was impossible for me to "choose" to rush step 2 without first knowing about step 2. Skipping those steps was less obvious with the Themes page because it's small and simple. With Extensions, we needed them. It's a pity I didn't learn about them in time to avoid causing you frustration or to avoid blowing up at you and hurting you.

In your defence, you stated that you learned about the 1-2-3 process during this whole experience. You couldn't tell me about it at the beginning because you hadn't figured it out yet. That's a big part of what I meant about steps 1 and 2 being as natural to you as breathing. They are so natural that you never thought about them; you just did them. Only now can you tell me about them, and that's the real pity.

3. The biggest misunderstanding happened when you created a separate workshop to test some things.
 * You started doing things we hadn't discussed, or hadn't discussed in detail.  That's okay, because it's your workshop, and because you wanted to assemble something so we'd have something to discuss. While I understand that now, at the time I got the impression you were running away on your own.
 * You worked very quickly in there, much faster than I could do the same things. Again, that's great! When it happened, though, I built on the previous assumption by thinking that you wanted to get things done and posted live before I had time to object.
 * You inserted un-Wiki formatting after we had discussed it previously. A few days before, I had mentioned that the Wiki's MOS doesn't like to see things like 2nd and 3rd, but prefers 2nd and 3rd. Even so, you added the "sup" tags to your page and mentioned that you had done so in a public summary of changes. I took all of this to mean that you wanted them in there, no matter what, and that you were going to make sure they stayed, no matter what.
 * You reworked the structure to prepare for a split category and posted the proposal for the structure to get the community's input. Again, good. I felt slighted because you and I had not yet come together on what to propose. I had some differing ideas about order and names of sections, among other things. I am NOT saying that we should have used my ideas instead of yours. (If you doubt this, refer again to section 1.) I AM saying that I thought we ought to have discussed things and reached agreement first before presenting things to everyone else. After making the first three erroneous assumptions, the fourth was the "obvious" conclusion that you were trying to take over the project.

All of these were failings of communication on my part. When I was unsure of the purpose of a separate working page, I failed to ask. When I had different ideas about how things should look, I failed to mention them. I did post something about the "sup" tags, but I wasn't very pleasant. When you posted a proposed new structure, I should have recognised that you were helping the project by taking away from me the burden of creating to be proposed, and I simply should have provided my input then.

Instead, I screwed up.

You already stated that you have no further interest in working with me. I understand, and I don't blame you. You also stated that some of the things I wrote in anger make you want to leave the Wiki. I ask you to reconsider.

I was the arsehole in this situation. I didn't just screw up, I screwed up huge. I alienated the one person on here with whom I've worked the most and from whom I've received the most beneift. Even though I never thought I was "owning" a page, two people have stated that's exactly what they saw. Therefore, this choice is clear.

You should stay. I'm leaving the TrainStation Wiki. I've lost all credibility, anyway, so no one would trust me if I stayed. If you wish to continue in Workshop E and improve the page for the communiy, feel free. If you wish to cease work on a new Extensions page and hope someone else comes along and finishes the job, feel free. If you wish to curse my name to the hills, feel free. You've been right this whole time, so I'm sure that whatever decision you make now will be right, too.