[QA] testing suggestion: Comments In Local Time gadget

[Sumana Harihareswara]

If you're interested in writing automated tests to check that a gadget
is functioning, here's one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comments_in_Local_Time

"Change UTC-based times and dates, such as those used in signatures, to
be relative to local time."

According to
https://raw.github.com/Ironholds/MetaAnalysis/master/GadgetUsage/gadgets_by_wikis.tsv
, almost 100,000 people have turned on this gadget, across 21 wikis.
(This analysis misses users who use this functionality because their
site turns the gadget on by default; we don't know how many that is.)

As you can see in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Comments_in_Local_Time#Nasty_bug_on_Commons_.28source_of_file_page_disappears.29
, developer Gary King was really responsive to a bug report in early
May, so if tests reveal bugs in the gadget, the developer will probably
fix it quickly.

Other gadgets you could target:
We're still waiting for more statistics on gadget usage (see
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2013-July/000708.html ),
but we have enough data to suggest simpler gadgets (thus easier to test)
that many people use.  I like "Comments in Local Time" as a first
suggestion, but here are four more.

* UTCLiveClock:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.js Used by
at least 538,788 people across 116 wikis and maintained by Timo Tijhof
and Max Semenik.  Of course, if more wikis adopted Comments In Local
Time, fewer people might need the UTC clock!

* Open external links in a new tab/window:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-exlinks.js , used on 56
wikis by over 400,000 people.  Hasn't been touched in years so one can
infer that it rarely breaks.

* Adding an edit link to the lead section of a page: edit0, a.k.a.
edittop. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop.js
 Used by more than 500,000 people across more than 70 wikis, and
probably more; for instance, it's enabled for everyone by default on
Chinese Wikipedia:
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:%E5%B0%8F%E5%B7%A5%E5%85%B7?uselang=en
.  MatmaRex, Edokter, and others maintain it; per
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Gadget-edittop.js#VisualEditor.3F
Edokter is interested in rewriting it from scratch, so having regression
tests would probably be useful to him.

* markAdmins: in special, user, discussion, project, file and help pages
and in version differences and the history, indicate when a user has
elevated privileges.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:PDD/markAdmins.js is one place
it's installed; it's on at least 13 wikis with 60,000 users.

Happy testing!
-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation