Erik Moeller wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of de-cluttering prefs. IMO this ought to be done on the basis of proper metrics of current usage, so that we actually understand who is using these options today and why.
Some of the RFC is also trying to focus on the history of some of these user preferences. A lot of these preferences are very old and pre-date the Gadgets extension, for example. Some of them would make more sense implemented differently (client-side v. server-side) while some of them ought to simply be moved to a MediaWiki extension or possibly be removed altogether.
Do we have a more complete report than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/User_preferences ? If not, could someone pull one? It would be ideal to not only have prefs listed by frequency, but to also exclude users from the set who've not been recently active.
That report is based on the Toolserver's MySQL view of the user_properties database table called "user_properties_anonym" (the report's Python source code can be found one layer below at /Configuration). To get aggregate stats about user preferences, it requires someone with shell access querying the database. I think everyone who's commented on the RFC agrees that stats would be helpful. Does this require an RT ticket or a Bugzilla ticket or an e-mail to the analytics people or something else?
MZMcBride