On 12/31/06, Rob Church robchur@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