Admins are
currently given broad leeway to customize the user
experience for all users, including addition of site-wide JS, CSS,
etc. These are important capabilities of the wiki that have been
used for many clearly beneficial purposes. In the long run, we will
want to apply a code review process to these changes as with any
other deployed code, but for now the system works as it is and we
have no intent to remove this capability.
Sorry, I strongly disagree that the current system works. Every so
often we discover that a wiki has been loading external resources in
site-wide JS for months. Local sysops might have no idea on what
they're doing, and just copy and paste what someone told them to do.
Edits like [1] make that terribly obvious.
I filed bug 69445[2] as a tracking bug to implement a sane code review
process for these pages. I don't imagine it will happen anytime soon,
but now seems like a good time to start discussion about it.
I'm fine with having some sort of code review system, so long as it is
implemented in such a way that there are volunteers with +2 for it.
I'm not sure implementing this user right though was the best way to
go about beginning that implementation, at least with the sort of
charged atmosphere that currently exists within the Wikimedia
editor communities.
Perhaps the change could be reverted and we could spend some time on
this list discussing how such a code review system would work? Give some
time for the editors to calm down and all of us to calm down. (A quick
look at Meta shows a lot of hate.) I think if this is implemented
slowly with lots of notice it might have a better chance of succeeding.
I think Erik's commit is likely poisoned at this point and any work
that stems from it is unlikely to be accepted by the wider community.
I like the discussion that is going on in #69445, thank you for filing
that Legoktm.
If nothing else, this whole debacle brought this issue back to the
center of discussion, somewhere where it needs to be.
Thank you,
Derric Atzrott