Hi everybody
at Swahili Wikipedia we have seen changes to our appearance which were
caused by action of a "Wikimedia Foundation Web team", without our own
consent. We discussed it in the community and by unanominous vote
decided to go back to the previous format. (see
https://sw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Jumuiya#Muonekano_mpya_wa_kurasa_ze…!)
The main reason was that we have a number of Swahili help pages which
refer to the position of items on the screen and these we would have to
rewrite. As our present active team is too small, we presently do not
have the editing power to do that work.
We asked the people who brought the change to set us back, and they
refuse. First they did not react for weeks, and then they answer that
we should look for help to change our pages. We do not know who can do
this in Swahili language,nor did they propose any idea. See
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop_Improvements#Please…
We see, however, that in large wikipedias like enwiki and dewiki they
have not changed the appearance of pages. I know from German wikipedia
that they took a vote not to go along. So their decision was respected.
But they tell us that a decison was made (by whom ?) and now it looks
they decided to ignore us.
It is very obvious that they do not dare to act like this vis-avis a
large wikipedia like dewiki which also continues the old skin. Obviously
a small African language version is not worthwhile to be considered.
So who has an idea how to go about this situation?
Cheers - Kipala from swwiki