2014-09-06 1:07 GMT+02:00 Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com:
On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 1:48 PM, John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
IMO the WMF should stop focusing on English Wikipedia as a target deploy site, and stop allowing its product management team and WMF staff in general to be salesman for it - it is scaring the community that all WMF staff seem to be so heavily vested in this 'product' as the salvation of the wikis.
This is rank hyperbole.
The MediaWiki deployment train delivers new software to all projects every week. One stage is to non-Wikipedia projects, which actually get new software *first.* Then in a second stage is for all Wikipedias simultaneously. So the default behavior for rollouts, if all you do is merge your code and wait, is that English Wikipedia gets basically no special treatment..[1]
Now, for larger feature rollouts like VisualEditor or MediaViewer, the testing stage and eventual launch set their own special schedule. We have used English Wikipedia as a testing ground a lot in the past, which is natural when you consider a variety of factors.[2] That doesn't mean we haven't worked hard to test things out with non-English projects. Some examples:
I am sure you have tested things out on various wikis, but I can confirm that seeing things been rolled out from a non-English wiki, they multiple times look like if the English community has requested it or has been copied from. One (large) example is the TemplateData part of the VisualEditor which seems to us (nl-wiki) copied from the English Wikipedia, in multiple ways. This is not how we work with templates. And I can name many more examples.
Maybe it is not intended to adopt or specially fit with the English Wikipedia, if I compare software changes with the English Wikipedia and with the Dutch Wikipedia, most changes seem to fit exactly like the English Wikipedia and not with the Dutch Wikipedia. So many times it is locally thought and said that a change is likely "requested" by the English community.
Not that we make such big deal of it as we are already used to it, still this is how it is seen by at least some communities.
Romaine