Erik Moeller wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of de-cluttering prefs. IMO this
ought to be done on
the basis of proper metrics of current usage, so that we actually
understand who is using these options today and why.
Some of the RFC is also trying to focus on the history of some of these user
preferences. A lot of these preferences are very old and pre-date the
Gadgets extension, for example. Some of them would make more sense
implemented differently (client-side v. server-side) while some of them
ought to simply be moved to a MediaWiki extension or possibly be removed
altogether.
Do we have a more complete report than
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/User_preferences
? If not, could someone pull one? It would be ideal to not only have
prefs listed by frequency, but to also exclude users from the set
who've not been recently active.
That report is based on the Toolserver's MySQL view of the user_properties
database table called "user_properties_anonym" (the report's Python source
code can be found one layer below at /Configuration). To get aggregate stats
about user preferences, it requires someone with shell access querying the
database. I think everyone who's commented on the RFC agrees that stats
would be helpful. Does this require an RT ticket or a Bugzilla ticket or an
e-mail to the analytics people or something else?
MZMcBride