This is the exact kind of attitude the op-ed in the Signpost is addressing.
When making major feature decision, such as redoing the entire templating
system, we cannot just say to editors "oh, if you want some input, go and
join our mailing list". That's just a passive-aggressive way of pushing
editors out of the conversation. How many purely editors, i.e., not
developers, are on this list actively participating in discussion?
And this isn't a technical decision, it's a requirements decision. We're
not deciding what algorithm to use, or what object design to implement,
we're deciding what features would be best for the users of Wikipedia. The
reason this extension was implemented (hopefully) was so that users could
have a better templating experience, but how can you possibly assume to
know what is best for the user without asking the users themselves? And no,
we cannot be expected to consult every language wiki, but on the other hand
we cannot completely ignore the community and suddenly launch this new
extension on them as if they'd known about it for years.
*--*
*Tyler Romeo*
Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015
Major in Computer Science
www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo(a)gmail.com
On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Ryan Lane <rlane32(a)gmail.com> wrote:
But
there's a difference between an issue and a solution. Yes, the
templating system is broken, and I'm sure many an editor will confirm
that,
but just because a system is broken does not mean
Lua is automatically
the
solution. To put it in other words: just because
people want a better
templating system does not imply they want Lua. What discussion, if any,
has there been that WMF wikis want Lua as their templating replacement.
As
said before,
mediawiki.org is mostly developers,
so there's no problem
with
that, but with the op-ed on the Signpost, we
should seriously question
whether the community wants this feature before randomly forcing it on
them.
Which community should be consulted on this technical decision? What
if enwiki wants prolog and dewiki wants lua and enwikitionary wants
javascript? Occasionally technical decisions have to be made by the
developers. The templating language is a technical decision. It's
really not something that is up for editor community debate.
This decision was hashed out over months (really a couple of years if
we consider the original iteration of this idea) with the developer
community. If the editor community wishes to take part in these kinds
of decisions, they should join wikitech-l.
- Ryan
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