On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
Since it does seem very close to going live, could I
ask if plans have
been made for how to handle announcing the arrival of this feature and
any post-implementation problems? Hopefully there won't be any or
many, but are there plans ranging from "rollback completely if things
go awfully wrong" to "make adjustments as needed and be responsive to
concerns raised"?
And how much input exactly will ordinary editors have
post-implementation? Is the interface flexible and can be changed by
editors or admins, and which bits can only be tweaked by developers
(either using common sense or following a community poll or Bugzilla
request or request somewhere else)? I ask this partly as someone who
(with others) may have to deal with any massive disputes or edit wars
that break out over this if some aspects of flagged revisions or its
interface are editable and changeable on-wiki (presumably in the
Mediawiki namespace, editable by admins only).
I think the ability for the community of editors and admins to make
such changes to the interface is a *good* thing, but want to be clear
exactly what is changeable and by whom, and if off-wiki requests are
needed, where to make them, and making this location and the whole
roll-out clear to people via on-wiki notices.
Presumably, an update will be made to the on-wiki pages about this
before it goes live? And there will some site notice giving some
warning? having things change mid-edit could be a bit disconcerting!
Carcharoth
These are good points. I'm cc'ing this to foundation-l, as the
Foundation is taking the primary role in rolling this out to the
English Wikipedia (or at least, has been). Maybe William and Erik can
comment on what the expectations are for the extension's
documentation, and what sort of delay we can expect between the coming
development end point and live access on en.wp? Does the WMF plan to
follow the trial roll out described on community pages there, or
something else?
Nathan