On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 9:34 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
Can someone summarize this thread? As far as I can tell someone has invented a requirement that all features be blessed by the WMF Features team, and I'm pretty sure that can't be right. Can it?
Of course not. I think Terry's mostly concerned that there's clear ownership and maintainership for a new extension going forward, and that it's properly reviewed before it goes out the door. He's overstating, but he's coming from a reasonable place of caution.
I like the checklist process in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Review_queue (irrespective of the exact steps) because it is agnostic as to who does the work required to get something out the door. That said, it's a given that WMF does get the blame when things go wrong, especially on a large scale, and as operator of the sites we do have a role in making sure we're not causing harm, incurring unreasonable technical debt, or going against WMF's goals.
As for MassMessage, I looked at and played with it and there were definitely issues with just pushing it out the door. As originally planned, it would enable any admin anywhere to post bulk messages to any wiki from any other wiki using a bot account created by the extension. This raises policy and auditing questions beyond what EdwardsBot is doing. There's consensus for a simpler deployment to start with, with Meta acting as a place for coordinating cross-wiki messages. That seems reasonable to me, and I definitely look forward to seeing how well this works in practice.