On Mon, 25 Aug 2014, at 13:19, Pine W wrote:
I have heard very few people say "don't ever change the interface." I have heard people say "don't force an interface change on me that I don't think is an improvement."
VE was a good example. The sentiment of the community wasn't that VE''s concept is wrong, it's that the implementation and rollout had major deficiencies.
The MV issue is larger than than the usual editor-focused interface change because it impacts readers as well as editors, and there were issues with the display of licenses to readers. Personally I feel that the MV issues are fixable but the rollout should have been handled differently, and I am glad that the community and WMF both want to avoid repeating rollout problems again and again.
Pine
This instance is not new; https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_configuration_changes is a historical list of similar pattern in the relationship.
They already told you that they are doing this to not lose readers, so that fundraising keeps working. Tops you can do is, like the WMF folks remarked earlier, is have community work on what it needs "from the bottom up" "grassroots" etc.
A first step here, I believe, is have the Teams track bugs in the open; from my own experience, the Flow and Multimedia folks track bugs somewhere else where I can't even view or comment (and even if I could, it being different from Bugzilla would make things harder). I'm not sure what about migration to Phabricator, but I think it's an operations style of thing (I'm yet to figure out how to get involved, but it'd make it easier for anyone to work on the new features - they are really documented on-wiki (thankfully they only internalise only bug tracking atm), although so far only in English mostly).
svetlana