On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 9:32 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
I don't follow at all. Developers get to decide on defaults when we introduce a new feature, but once a feature already exists then it's locked in stone forever? That's certainly not how things work in practice. We've made significant changes to existing features in the past without asking communities first. Ditching Makesysop/Makebot in favor of better core userrights comes to mind, but I'm sure there are better examples.
Better example: recent discussion on whether to increase thumbnail image size cross-project. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21117 Software permitting, probably we'll increase the default thumb width across all projects. We aren't holding a poll in Meta first or anything, but this is a considerably more user-visible change than adjusting the access rights to an obscure and largely useless special page.