*Cross-posting to wikitech-l as it's a topic related to development.*

On Wed, 8 Jul 2020 at 23:01, Maarten Dammers maarten@mdammers.nl wrote:

Of interest to the wider community. I really hope this is not part of a larger pattern of the WMF ignoring community.

Maarten

I've had a great experience in the "Discussion Tools" (WMF's talk pages reply tool) project. Feedback is properly documented, considered and worked on. I recall having quite some input on the UI design and I'm happy that resulted in a clean, focused UI.

That is an example to follow, but there's a lot to improve in other areas. Although I favor GitLab, I was surprised that this introduction didn't have a community round other than the developer feedback survey. I assume the non-public results of the surcey justify this move and I'm happy with it, so no complaints, but it came as a surprise to me that this is happening as such discussions were promptly shut down on phabricator: I've given this suggestion once in a related topic and rude comments told me this is off-topic and basically to keep it to myself. The discussion ended abruptly and the ticket was closed within a day.

There was another discussion https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T167547 closed and declined after 4 comments from 3 participants in 12 minutes. This discussion was later referred to as the official decision to avoid GitLab :-) And prior to the current announcement, an attempt was made to rename this discussion to "RFC: ..." I have a hard time to understand these actions and correlate it to any consensus process and transparent communication.

The recent update to the history diff font https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T250393 also could have been communicated better. Informing editors about a simple solution (to change your editor font setting or add some CSS to common.css/global.css) would have avoided disruption and community backlash. Instead the latter solution was only shared reactively after complaints and the simple solution was not suggested.

I'd hope the developer team gives more attention to communication and transparency. I think this has improved in the last year, primarily in the preparation of Desktop Improvements and Talk pages project, but it's still a long path to improve engagement generally with the community and in particular development matters.

Aron (Demian)