On 30/12/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
It's not reasonable to expect the average person to differentiate between "people who hack CSS and JavaScript" and "developers". I read wikitech-l, know what CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MediaWiki are, and still don't really get who is responsible for what, or what caused each visible change. How is the average Wikipedia user supposed to have any idea?
It is reasonable, however, to expect people not to go ape shit when something happens that they don't like. It's furthermore reasonable to expect that people will listen when we say, for instance, "that change was done by one of your colleagues, not us - please go moan at them, kthx".
I don't really know how to improve this situation, but some sort of more visible process for improvements to MediaWiki and to the Wikipedia stylesheets might help. I don't consider Mediazilla "visible" at all.
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.
As I've said before, I well appreciate that not every change benefits everyone, but hopefully, none of them seriously hamper other users' ability to continue to operate. I for one *do* solicit user opinion when it comes to introducing major new things, or more likely, making significant changes to existing processes - and I not only involve the users, but I also check with Brion on a frequent basis that what I'm doing is sane.
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.
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.
Hope this helps.
Not really; your attitude is rather what I was talking about in my last post.
Rob Church