Jake Wartenberg wrote:
As a side note, what exactly is holding up implementation of this on enwiki?
That's an excellent question, and one I'm hopefully getting close to answering. As background, Erik recently brought me on for a few hours a week to move things along.
Part of the problem is definitely the size and complexity of the proposed feature set. There are also a number of outstanding questions about the best user interface, including issues with naming, clarity of the conceptual model, ease of use, and impact on various audiences, especially including readers. Plus, the extension is now in production use on 24 WMF projects, with nearly as many different configurations.
Those are all solvable problems, but resource constraints have kept us from progressing as fast as we'd like. Happily, the usability folks -- especially Howie Fung -- have had a little time to lend a hand with the UI issues, and I think we'll shortly have a proposal for something we can get into production soon. That would include enough measurement that we can see what the impact is, and provide for quick follow-ups if there are issues with the first release.
Once I have more solid info, I'll definitely mention it here. But in the meantime, the labs site being down is definitely holding us up some, so I'd love to find out how I can fix that.
Thanks,
William