Message: 6 Date: Sat, 2 Apr 2011 08:23:36 +0000 (UTC) From: Marcin Cieslak saper@saper.info Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Focus on sister projects To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: slrnipdn7t.2e75.saper@saper.info Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Ryan Kaldari wrote:
Yeah, the local CSS/JS cruft is definitely a problem. I've tried doing clean-up on a few wikis, but I usually just get chewed out by the local admins for not discussing every change in detail (which obviously doesn't scale for fixing 200+ wikis). I would love to hear ideas for how to address this problem.
This caught my eye as Wikimedia has far more than 200 wikis. There seems to be a shift happening within the Wikimedia Foundation. The sister projects have routinely been ignored in the past, but things seem to be going further lately....
The good thing about forgotten/abandoned/unloved/etc. projects is that they probably don't have lots of cruft accumulated in the global CSS/JS files (as they require quite lively tech-savvy community to maintain them).
So those sites will not probably require any changes and will survive HTML5 migration without any problems.
//Marcin
On the contrary, I find the small language wiki projects to be in much worse shape. Often they have syntax errors in their js files, breaking _all_ js. Other times they have stuff that is just plain wrong. (Like anyone remember the toolserver tool to gather stats before stuff was available at http://dammit.lt/wikistats/ - where projects would put js that pinged the toolserver once every 100 hits. That code is still in many small projects [usually with the project code field set to the wrong project]. I've even seen that code in wikis that were created after said toolserver tool stopped working). On the other hand they probably won't complain, as the js is already fairly broken ;)
-bawolff