Another example would be changing default options in core - recently I tried to push for making the enhanced recentchanges the default, but one of the blockers was that I'd need to let the Wikimedia communities know as the change would be applied there as well.
Unfortunately I didn't have any idea when such a change could or would be merged or deployed, so not only did I not have any timeframe to give said the communities, I didn't even know when it would be appropriate to tell them (if it happens months later, mentioning now would not be very helpful) - or even if it ever would really happen at all. As it was the change just sat in gerrit for a month before James Forrester agreed to merge it.
In this case it turns out there was another problem and now we're waiting on the wikidata folks to resolve that issue (namely that the enhanced recentchanges code kind of sucks), but the point is in many cases there is just no way volunteers can even know if something will actually be merged, let alone the timeframe, and thus expecting us to inform folks in these circumstances is a little ridiculous in general.
Don't get me wrong, I'd personally be happy to let folks know of such changes, but given how utterly unreliable the review process can be for changes coming from volunteers, it's just not a reasonable expectation.
On 21/03/13 16:43, Quim Gil wrote:
On 03/21/2013 02:55 AM, Niklas Laxström wrote:
I've seen a couple of instances where changes to MediaWiki are blocked until someone informs the community.
Someone is a volunteer.
Community is actually just the Wikimedia project communities. Or at least the biggest ones which are expected to complain and where the complaining would hurt.
This situation seems completely unfair to me. WMF should be able to communicate upcoming changes itself, not throw it to volunteers. Volunteers can help, but they should not be responsible for this to happen.
Can you point to the changes blocked, or to anything that would give a better idea to those of us that don't know what are the cases you are talking about?
I agree with the principle, but without more details it is difficult to help fixing the problem.