William Allen Simpson wrote:
On 10/9/12 5:25 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Just reiterating that discussing individual preferences (not to mention touching them) is a very bad idea before we have good criteria of some sort to evaluate them. Usage stats are a requirement but such criteria are not only about them because some preferences may be of small harm for many and of great use for "a few" (like thousands or dozens of thousands of users) who may also happen to be the most active users, making such prefs a net positive. Oh, and of course "gadgetization of preferences" means (almost) nothing.
Admittedly, having started circa 2003, I've not revisited or reset most of those settings very often -- and didn't notice some even existed.
But I don't usually run with JavaScript (rather, I use NoScript by default), so "gadgetization" seems like a terrible idea to me!
You're not saving anything by moving from one place to another. It's just another chance for further bit-rot.
The virtue of gadgetization comes from the idea that MediaWiki, following the development of Wikipedia, contains a number of user preferences that were tailored to a specific problem or a specific need on (the English) Wikipedia that might be better handled nowadays by a local solution (such as a JavaScript gadget). Yes, of course, gadgetization ultimately moves the user preference from one tab to another and there are still code maintenance costs, but gadgetization can reduce the complexity of MediaWiki (in terms of code and UI clutter). I think the usage stats will be illuminating.
And, of course, having global (Wikimedia-wide) gadgets or a gadgets repository for any MediaWiki installation to use would mitigate some of the other pitfalls of gadgetization. That doesn't mean it's evil, that just means gadgetization needs to be used sensibly. Much like anything else.
MZMcBride