On 12/31/06, Rob Church <robchur(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If you're suggesting that we need to start asking
for permission
before we commit every single improvement to the software, then you
can forget it; a lot of them have to be done to make the site more
stable.
Asking permission? No. But the current situation looks to me like:
1) Developers randomly without any warning make unannounced changes
that affect users.
2) CSS and Javascript hackers randomly without any warning make
unannounced changes that affect users.
3) Users get peeved due to their feeling of powerlessness, and not
knowing any better, blame developers or CSS/Javascript hackers at
random.
4) Developers consider this unfair.
How do you think this can be improved?
BugZilla is the bug tracking software, and it's
where we track bugs
and feature requests. I'm sorry if it's not considered wholly visible
to all users, but it's not our fault no-one likes to link to it in,
e.g. the sidebar, or other visible places on Wikipedia. If people have
significant objections to something, we have that; and we also have
this mailing list, which is not private, and at least two public IRC
channels, which are not invite-only.
And I guess the technical village pump
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29).
It's probably fair to say that the developers prefer Bugzilla and IRC,
and that users prefer wiki-based discussion, hence the yawning gap
between them.
Is there a running changelog accessible from Wikipedia perhaps? Some
centralised place where highly visible changes are logged?
I strongly object to the assertion that the
development team is in
anyway elitist or deliberately ignorant of user opinion; that is
simply unfair and completely untrue. If we didn't care about the user
base, we wouldn't actually be doing this.
I would disagree with that assertion, too.
Steve