On 30/12/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)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