On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 9:13 AM, Trey Jones <tjones(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
So, if the community of bot creators is generally
responsive to changes to
the API and default behavior,
Some are, many aren't. Some bots are run by people who barely understand
the code, because they took it over from a now-retired user—this is the
result of "find[ing] those bots new homes". Others are run by people who
are still active in a sense but lack the time or motivation to make many
changes.
User scripts and gadgets can be in an even worse situation, as the original
maintainer may have retired leaving *no* replacement while others continue
to use the script.
I also feel like humans users expect and deserve the
best results we can
give them, so I lean more towards making the change the default.
In a sense there are no "human users" of the API. It's always programs of
some sort using it to fetch data to then reformat for display to humans.
In a different sense, of course, there are human users, but not the ones
you're probably thinking of. These users are the programmers who create
these programs. But I don't think this change would be as useful as the
recent continuation change, and particularly I don't think it's useful
enough to justify the amount of work that would be required to properly
communicate it.
A more complex and more general approach might be to
version the API...
though that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
See T41592, particularly the reasons given for declining it.
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation