Le 05/12/13 11:28, Alex Brollo a écrit :
Users are very confused and worried any time a new version of wiki software is launched and tested, and some major or minor bug comes invariably out.
A clear message using central sitenotice, with links to doc pages listing the changes at different levels of detail and to their talk pages to discuss them and to alert for bugs, is mandatory IMHO. Tech news are largely insufficient; evidence of work in progress should be clearly visible into all pages of interested projects. It's a basic matter of Wikilove.
Hello Alex,
The large majority of the 500 millions of users browsing our sites don't care about software updates. That is maybe appealing to a few thousands user at most. So I would prefer we do not annoy 9 times the population of France :-D
Those interested can look at:
WMF deployment calendar: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployment
Roadmap of MediaWiki core deployments: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/Roadmap
Whenever a new version is pushed, a script generate an exhaustive list of changes being deployed at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/wmf5
The link being reachable from the Roadmap page above.
Finally there is the very useful wikitech-ambassadors mailing list which is used to reach out to the community whenever a big new feature is landing in (ie change of the search backend, OAuth, HTTPS ..). That is worth a read :-]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
cheers,