[Wikipedia-l] Bugs? or Features?

[Guardian Tor]

----- Original Message -----
Lars Aronsson wrote

> In my mind, Wikipedia is about volunteering to make the world better.
> If you are concerned about the divide between wikipedia-l and
> wikitech-l, then *you* can bridge the gap by joining both lists and
> post summaries to wikipedia-l of the technical issues currently under
> discussion.

I hope I don't sound like I'm giving orders; I know we're all volunteers here, including Mr. Wales, who has volunteered his servers and talents to keep the whole show running. I'm not asking for summaries of all technical discussions, nor do I think they should be moved to Wikipedia-L (they were just moved *off* of this list not that long ago). When I say I'm worried about the programmers becoming isolated (note that I don't think the programmering subcommunity *is* isolated yet), I'm mainly talking about two things.

The first is if a Bomis sysadmin has to take drastic steps to keep Wikipedia running (i.e. temporarily removing major functionality), could some sort of announcement  made soon afterwards? That way, the community doesn't have to guess what's going on.

The second is my concern about what the Cunctator calls "featuritis". I think that any *major* new software features should be discussed in the general Wikipedia assembly. For example, what is the "Autowikification" button (no offence intended to whoever implemented it!)? What does it do? Why is it useful? How do I use it? Most importantly, do we need it? It sounds like it automatically links words to existing articles. If so, I would argue against the utility of such a creature.

However, I also think that the programmers should not have to be nitpicked by a bunch of people who don't code. ;-) It's only major stuff that I'm talking about here.

So, it's not that I want someone to sum up "This Week on Wikitech-L" all the time. Anyone interested in that can join the list. I'm just looking for ways to keep the rest of the community in the loop concerning major changes to everyday Wikipedia work.

-- Stephen Gilbert

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