It seems that this (partly) adressed at me...
Right. Talk about private clubs. I understand that the list serves mostly to facilitate improvements on the site, and therefore runs to programming conversations. HOWEVER, even though I have worked on a development team where I had to deal with SQL developers on a regular basis, I can't follow you guys at all.
Sorry to hear that. We (the geeks;) might get our own mailing list soon (wiki-geek-l?), so this list can be more "meta" again, concerning content, and less tech talk.
This is all in the way of showing that the geekspeak is a bit exclusionary. Probably not in and of itself a problem -- except that you guys are talking about changes (and in the case of the new site, implementing changes) that affect all of us other users -- AND YOU AREN'T COMMUNICATING THEM. The FAQ's haven't really been updated, lots of people seem unaware that the /subpage no longer exists.... and even those of us who would be happy to help document changes and spread the word can't, because we don't speak programmer well enough to be sure.
The sourceforge test page was announced several month ago, together with the notice that we will eventually switch to this software. Big signs on the 'pedia itself *and* this list. Not many people showed up.
Then, we got meta.wikipedia.com. People used (and use) it, made some comments.
Then, we had discussion about subpages (more than I could stand, actually;), on the wiki, the meta.wiki, and this list.
Then, we got test.wikipedia.com. Again, everybody was invited to look and test.
Then, after month of testing and announcing, we switched over to the new software.
True, documentation is not as it is supposed to be. IMHO, this is because of three reasons : 1. Personally, I dislike writing lengthy documentation for my software, even more than ironing ;) 2. The software is still "in flux". Things are still changing, because we can make them better. I write changes and bugfixes as soon as I get home from work, and I log off at 1am. No time to write documentation that will be obsolete tomorrow. See the "Most Wanted" as an example of how things change. 3. Non-programmers don't seem to care (except you, I guess).
Anyway, there's *some* docu at "PHP script new behaviours".
For pity's sake -- can we please clean up the documentation for rev2 before going to rev2a? I'll help -- but not unless somebody helps me first!
If there's *anything* you need to know about the software that you can't conclude from using it, do not hesitate to mail me personally :)
Magnus