Quim Gil wrote:
Sorry, but the behavior in your reply constitutes an anti-pattern of collaboration in a friendly space. No bug or feature or difference of opinions justifies it. Please, let's be friendly, or at the very least respectful.
There's no indication that the Wikimedia Foundation mobile team is interested in collaboration. Years of evidence suggest that the team is only interested in shoving as many features as possible into the MobileFrontend extension to avoid scrutiny and review. The Wikimedia Foundation mobile team needs to re-integrate with the rest of the Wikimedia community. The past behavior of violating core Wikimedia design principles, such as prohibiting open editing with misleading error messages and discouraging new article creation by unilaterally removing red links, has been consistently unacceptable and it needs to stop.
Better than Phabricator tasks, there are Gerrit changesets waiting to be reviewed, but there's only been obstructionism from the mobile team. It's pretty tiring and any help you can provide in cleaning up this mess would definitely be appreciated. As it is, I'm still hoping we can kill the MobileFrontend extension in 2015, but it's a bit of a long shot.
I've been thinking about some mobile development principles. One easy principle seems to be, as a general rule, that mobile features are a strict subset of desktop site features. That is, if this mobile strapline is so important that it must be shouted at our users, using bold font and bright colors in a very prominent position, then there should at least be some parity with the desktop site. And there are, of course, lessons to be learned from the stripped down mobile interface. For example, if the sidebar links and paragraph of disclaimer text in the footer really aren't necessary, why include them on desktop? It's time for reconciliation here.
MZMcBride