I totally understand this frustration, and I'm not really sure what the solution is. There's no WMF team responsible for Wikisource (other than the small amounts of work that my team, CommTech, gets to do; although I'm writing this email as my volunteer self). So it's up to whoever wants to do the work, and generally getting the work done comes first and any announcements or outreach are an after-thought and can sometimes get forgotten.

There's lots of development happening with Wikisource-related things at the moment, because there are more developers interested. Which is really great! I feel like it's exciting, and there's lots of enthusiasm. Some bits of the Wikisource stack have been unchanged for years and years, because they're quite complicated, and responsibility has fallen on the same few users to fix any problems. Now we seem to be in an era of new features, which comes with different challenges.

So I'm sorry if it feels like Wikisource is used as a guinea pig — I think it's more that the software stack here is unique among Wikimedia projects. Changes do get tested, nothing is ever merged that hasn't been checked by multiple developers. But we don't have a good system of rolling out big changes like the recent update to the zoom/pan library (from a homegrown system to OpenSeadragon).

We need more volunteer product managers! As in, people to have a good overview of what development is happening or needs to happen, and help it go smoothly. It's no harder than herding cats, surely!

Sorry, I don't think I'm writing any of this very clearly... all I really wanted to reply was "we're doing our best, and no one's got enough time!". But there's lots more to it.

—Sam

Hi all,

  as usual, I get surprised every time there are major changes on the MediaWiki software that are deployed without providing advance warning to the community.

Every time it's the same story: something stops working on the project. A gadget, a toolbar or some personalised JS.

This time it was T288141 (see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T288141), that was deployed in all the Wikisources (then rolled back because WikiMedia computer scientists are the best) completely disrupting redesigning the image side of the Page namespace. This affected the toolbars (see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T296033) and several gadgets around all the Wikisources.

I am not saying that MediaWiki software shouldn't be improved: it's normal that we're trying to get all we can from this outdated software. I am just asking that major changes that affect all the Wikisources should be announced in every single Village Pump waaay before deploying them on the projects.

Is it possible, as a Usergroup, to do a little pressure to be considered as a community and not as guinea pigs on which to deploy new, partially-tested features?

Alex

Ruthven on Wikipedia

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