On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 08:22:13PM +0200, Rainer Rillke wrote:
Yeah, that would be cool: I am tool "x", I do "y" and you can disable me pressing button "z". Let button "z" be a prominent element of the UI for the time of testing at large scale.
For the record, we did the first part of this - there was a link to the preferences page that would let you disable the feature at the bottom of the metadata panel from the day we pushed to the 3rd pilot sites, I think.
As for "prominent", I don't think that's a good idea because it would disrupt the realism of the feature. The purpose of such a feature would be temporary, and when it got removed from the UI, it would cause a (small) jolt to users. We already have a bunch of weird one-time things that are cluttering the toolbar, we didn't need another one disrupting the flow of our product.
If you're a power user, you know where Special:Preferences is, and we made sure to help you out as much as possible if you don't. I don't think we needed to do anything to make the preference more discoverable, it would have been a waste of our time to do so given the other things we have on our plates.
I can't speak to the community side of things - I was under the impression that very few people had actually had that much trouble with the docs, but perhaps the issues with them should be brought up *on their talk page* rather than launching some weird campaign over a feature that, frankly, could not *possibly* have been launched in a more cautious way.
Cheers,