Billinghurst billinghurst@gmail.com wrote:
Ryan,
While admins will always be protective of their patch, especially if something breaks universally, none of us wishes to impede progress and we want to know how we can help. -> Make us do our homework -> Give us time to marshal resources, and -> Have expectations that we should be organised to help. If we cannot do that, then it is somewhat upon our heads if you have to do what you have to do.
Frankly, from my experience as sysop at plwiki (not a sister project, though, but I did some of the css/js work for pl* sisters), I'd rather recommend to explain a bit (like "say who you are"), but go ahead with the changes. Maybe a single page on meta will do. The problem will be with non-English projects, as some people may not read English at all, like some of the quite MediaWiki-savvy admins in the projects for smaller languages in the former USSR.
Giving time and having much discussion serves little point, since from my experience those volunteers who spent lots of time on building those scripts now how little time to re-write them or review them (as many of stuff simply needs to be deleted). Some may react badly, like just reverting changes because "it works". Well, it works in a way, and very often some strange effect appear (mainly because changed loading order of js/css).
I am all for opening up extensions for sister projects - [[Extension:Proofread]] improved situation at many wikisources, I would envision we have more sister-project-related extensions in the SVN, even if they are CSS- or JS- only (or mostly). This gives core developers a chance to better understand of the impact they make and gives them the opportunity to fix problems themselves in a cross-repository sweeping commits with proper commit logs.
//Marcin