On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 9:13 AM, Trey Jones tjones@wikimedia.org wrote:
So, if the community of bot creators is generally responsive to changes to the API and default behavior,
Some are, many aren't. Some bots are run by people who barely understand the code, because they took it over from a now-retired user—this is the result of "find[ing] those bots new homes". Others are run by people who are still active in a sense but lack the time or motivation to make many changes.
User scripts and gadgets can be in an even worse situation, as the original maintainer may have retired leaving *no* replacement while others continue to use the script.
I also feel like humans users expect and deserve the best results we can give them, so I lean more towards making the change the default.
In a sense there are no "human users" of the API. It's always programs of some sort using it to fetch data to then reformat for display to humans.
In a different sense, of course, there are human users, but not the ones you're probably thinking of. These users are the programmers who create these programs. But I don't think this change would be as useful as the recent continuation change, and particularly I don't think it's useful enough to justify the amount of work that would be required to properly communicate it.
A more complex and more general approach might be to version the API... though that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
See T41592, particularly the reasons given for declining it.