On 12/30/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
When this feature was first introduced, some bright spark on the English Wikipedia edited the global CSS and made the numbers bright, garish green and red, and emboldened them - I didn't agree with that, but whatever. However, there were a huge number of not-too-polite complaints blaming us for doing it, and some of these failed to subside when it was pointed out that this had nothing to do with the development team.
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?
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.
Hope this helps.
Steve