Another example would be changing default options in core - recently I
tried to push for making the enhanced recentchanges the default, but one
of the blockers was that I'd need to let the Wikimedia communities know
as the change would be applied there as well.
Unfortunately I didn't have any idea when such a change could or would
be merged or deployed, so not only did I not have any timeframe to give
said the communities, I didn't even know when it would be appropriate to
tell them (if it happens months later, mentioning now would not be very
helpful) - or even if it ever would really happen at all.
As it was the change just sat in gerrit for a month before James
Forrester agreed to merge it.
In this case it turns out there was another problem and now we're
waiting on the wikidata folks to resolve that issue (namely that the
enhanced recentchanges code kind of sucks), but the point is in many
cases there is just no way volunteers can even know if something will
actually be merged, let alone the timeframe, and thus expecting us to
inform folks in these circumstances is a little ridiculous in general.
Don't get me wrong, I'd personally be happy to let folks know of such
changes, but given how utterly unreliable the review process can be for
changes coming from volunteers, it's just not a reasonable expectation.
On 21/03/13 16:43, Quim Gil wrote:
On 03/21/2013 02:55 AM, Niklas Laxström wrote:
I've seen a couple of instances where changes
to MediaWiki are blocked
until someone informs the community.
Someone is a volunteer.
Community is actually just the Wikimedia project communities. Or at
least the biggest ones which are expected to complain and where the
complaining would hurt.
This situation seems completely unfair to me. WMF should be able to
communicate upcoming changes itself, not throw it to volunteers.
Volunteers can help, but they should not be responsible for this to
happen.
Can you point to the changes blocked, or to anything that would give a
better idea to those of us that don't know what are the cases you are
talking about?
I agree with the principle, but without more details it is difficult
to help fixing the problem.
--
-— Isarra