Hi everyone,
As I'm sure you're all aware, the Pending Changes trial began earlier this week, and seems to be off to a great start. There are many issues to be sorted out both on the community policy side and on the technical side, but everyone here seems to grappling with the community issues without a lot of prodding. On the development front, the team now has a blissfully mundane software maintenance/incremental improvement process to deal with, as opposed to feeling antsy about needing to deploy.
With the launch out of the way, William is now wrapping up and turning the project management reigns over to me. When I first started contracting with WMF back in the beginning of May, I had the mistaken assumption that I'd be taking over then, since William had/has another huge opportunity that is looming on the horizon that appeared likely to take 100% of his time. In our first meeting as we started going over the transition, he resolutely pointed out "no, I'm staying until we deploy this, however long it takes". We are really glad he was able to stick with us through this, and we're extremely grateful for his tenacity and commitment. This feature would likely have been delayed longer and would have missed many critical details without him. I learned a lot about project management working with him, and enjoyed it a great deal. Thanks William!
The main developers, (Aaron and Chad) plan to continue knocking down issues as they discover them, as well as continuing to whittle down the backlog of issues we postponed until after the initial deployment: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157
Some of the most significant work surrounds the "reject" button an a few related tweaks. Since the topic of how exactly to optimize the workflow is still a subject of debate, we'd appreciate some feedback on the subject. The features in question are all linked to from here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs/Specifications
The trial itself is slated to last until August 15. After that, community consensus will be required to leave the feature on permanently. A strict reading of the proposed trial would suggest we're obligated to turn the feature off immediately around August 15, but I've seen at least one comment suggesting we leave it on that time. I've proposed here that we instead leave the feature turned on while we discuss the permanent status: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Trial#leaverunni...
If you have any concerns that need the dev team's attention, please bring them up here: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Pending_Changes_issues
We're a little behind in looking at that page, but we will get back to you if you post there. We'll also get back to you if you prefer to post to Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&...
That's all for now. Thanks for reading! Rob p.s. I didn't want to turn this email into a parody of an overly-long Oscar speech, but I also did want to specially call out Aaron Schulz, the lead developer on this project, who did a remarkable job developing and preparing the software for this launch as well as making sure that any problems that we did inadvertently introduced were knocked down extremely quickly (often within minutes of finding out). Great work, Aaron!
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