Nick Jenkins wrote:
What I'm thinking is that a beta.en.wikipedia.org instance wouldn't be so bad, if it had the same data on the back end.
Along a similar vein, would it help to have a public test wiki that always ran the absolute bleeding edge? (As opposed to test.wikipedia.org which runs an NFS checkout before the sync, and as such usually differs little from most of the Wikipedia sites). Example hostname: http://dogfood.wikipedia.org/ . That way keen people could try new stuff out earlier, and maybe we might get some feedback sooner, before changes impact the whole userbase, thus possibly resulting in greater harmony?
There's test.leuksman.com. For security reasons, we wouldn't want such a thing on the main cluster, and after SUL is enabled, we won't be able to have it on a *.wikipedia.org domain either.
In any case, it wouldn't be very much earlier than test.wikipedia.org, just a few days in most cases. I don't think it's going to work to rely on random community review in that period, I think we need to have a testing procedure for CSS changes which allow us to actively test for this kind of problem.
I reviewed the diff before I put these changes live, and I checked test.wikipedia.org for obvious fatal errors. I would have visually checked the English Wikipedia main page too, before sync, if we had a procedure in place for that. George Herbert's suggestion to have a beta.en.wikipedia.org running on the same database would be one to do that.
-- Tim Starling