On 31/12/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Asking permission? No. But the current situation looks to me like:
- Developers randomly without any warning make unannounced changes
that affect users.
We try to avoid doing this wherever possible - Tim in particular is very good at alerting wikitech-l and wikipedia-l in advance of making changes, e.g. to the blocking mechanism, earlier this year.
Sometimes, stuff slips through the net, and what seems major to users is not so major to us.
- CSS and Javascript hackers randomly without any warning make
unannounced changes that affect users.
Not our fault, I'm afraid; discipline them accordingly.
- Users get peeved due to their feeling of powerlessness, and not
knowing any better, blame developers or CSS/Javascript hackers at random.
Not our fault.
- Developers consider this unfair.
Well, it is!
How do you think this can be improved?
Encourage administrators with poor aesthetic taste not to make changes to the sitewide CSS without consulting users. I thought this was the usual precedent on your wiki?
And I guess the technical village pump (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29).
No longer an official forum because it's not suitable for tracking bugs.
Is there a running changelog accessible from Wikipedia perhaps? Some centralised place where highly visible changes are logged?
The Wikipedia Signpost has a "bugs, repairs and internal operational news" slot each week, which includes software changes; I used to maintain that bit before I disappeared in August, and Simetrical now does a sterling job of it (although it's not necessarily fair to expect that he will continue to do so), providing a damn sight better description of most things than I ever did.
This isn't necessarily particularly official, either, but since you've got a committer updating it...infer what you like. There's always the Subversion log. Oh, but of course...non developers don't apparently like opening their damn browsers.
I would disagree with that assertion, too.
That's odd, because it seemed to me that your previous post perpetuated it.
Rob Church