2016-12-10 11:07 GMT+02:00 Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org:
For reference, these are the changes being discussed: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/F5022813
- Significantly larger changes than this are happening all the time (the
OOUI-ification of old forms, for example), without anyone noticing,
Agreed. However, these changes do not apply to millions of articles. It's a question of scale and visibility.
it's pretty clear people are reacting to the announcement here and not the actual change.
That's one way to put it. I would rather say that we reacted to yet another slip-up in communication from the Foundation. Why is it so hard for you guys to push the information to wikis?
There is nothing wrong with not paying attention to something well outside your work area, and people should not be excluded from a discussion topic just because they are new (or casual) to it, but please consider how it creates an unhealthy community dynamic when people are criticized for announcing changes which would otherwise go unnoticed.
I don't think an RFC was needed, but: 1. an announcement on this list with a phabricator number would have been nice 2. an announcement *on wiki, before the deployment* was mandatory.
The rest of your mail does not seem related to this particular change, so I'll respond separately.
2016-12-10 1:43 GMT+02:00 Andre Klapper aklapper@wikimedia.org:
Regarding a heads-up, would it have helped to have these changes listed in https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2016/49 ?
Yes, with a follow-up in /50. Do note that the text in /50 is insufficient, you might want to add something like what Amir said: "in order to keep consistency between all elements of a wiki page, change such usages in your Mediawiki:Common.css (for example for infoboxes)." That's because not all TechNews readers can deduce action items by themselves.
HTH, Strainu