2016-12-10 12:48 GMT+02:00 Amir Ladsgroup ladsgroup@gmail.com:
I just want you to stop there
On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 2:07 PM Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
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?
Why is this related to WMF?
For 3 reasons: 1. While MW is open source, what gets deployed on the WMF servers is the legal and moral responsability of the Foundation. 2. The WMF has an 8-person "Community Liaisons" team that is dedicated to "inform the communities during the whole process of development of said software, and facilitate its adoption." [1] For me, that means that they should be the ones that make sure that changes that impact million of pages don't get left out, even if the developer forgets to notify anyone. 3. The average wikipedian does not seem to make the difference between volunteer developers and employees of the WMF (this is a personal opinion and I might be wrong).
Do you really want to compare this to something like MediaViewer rollout?
MediaViewer, VisualEditor and many others, yes. But not in the sense that this was as bad as those, rather that the WMF missed another good opportunity to establish trust and prepare for the next big feature.
Small, almost invisible changes are the best time to practice and experiment with notifications and to gauge the community response: how many communities actually made changes to Common.css? How many needed to make changes? For the ones that did not make the changes, was it because they did not have the knowledge or because they missed the memo? Etc, etc, etc... This way, we (the "tech abassadors"), you (developers) and them (community liaisons) can all be better prepared for the next big deployement.
Strainu