May be, but should talk to the users first before enabling new features in the software.
Do you talk to users of the articles you edit before you edit them. I don't. If anything I put a note on the talk page if I think that my edits may be controversial. But most of the time I just edit.
If the developers had to talk with us each time they implement a new feature, then MediaWiki development would grind to almost nothing. I haven't seen any evidence that Erik acted wrongly (he announced the new feature and asked people to test it on the test wiki before it went live - wow, what a crime!).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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