John Vandenberg wrote:
===System administrators===
19) System administrators are responsible for the MediaWiki software
configuration of the projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, such as
English Wikipedia. They make changes to configuration based on a mix
of Wikimedia Foundation, technical and project considerations. While
their decisions may affect the English Wikipedia, those decisions are
beyond the jurisdiction of the English Wikipedia community and its
Arbitration Committee. The local community may, of course, challenge
these decisions, but must at all times respect them, Complains should
be lodged at meta forums, such as Bugzilla, #wikimedia-tech,
wikitech-l, foundation-l and meta, each having their own processes and
customs which should be respected.
Perhaps also note that the community can request changes on
configuration (which may then be rejected by reasons like inefficiency
of the proposed solution, going agaisnt WMF principles...).
===Deprecation of MediaWiki functionality===
21) The MediaWiki software used on the Wikimedia projects, and
configuration of that software, is the responsibility of the
developers and system administrators.
In the same way that system administrators are the decision makers to
enable new functionality, deprecation or removal of MediaWiki
functionality is a technical decision, and implementation of that
decision may have technical implications that need to be considered.
The project community should engage the technical team in decisions
which relate to use the software.
Policies, procedures and the manual of style may govern how and when
the software may be used, however decisions to deprecate or disable
software features are best left in the hands of the technical staff.
Regards,
John Vandenberg
Consultation with the technical staff is recommended before doing
technical changes, so the consequences are fully understood. 'Trivial'
changes may degrade the site. 'Optimization' changes may be useless :)
While enabling a never-used feature is a difficult process, disabling
one is hardly a problem.
Mediawiki developers try hard to maintain all the used functionality,
and is unlikely to decide by themselves disabling a feature actively
used (although such events can't be completely discarded, eg. as an
effect of a rewrite).