In my short time at the Foundation I've seen various problems which have risen due to communication problems between seasoned wikipedia editors, WMF teams and volunteer developers. Echo comes to mind as does the mobile photo upload feature my team designed.
It strikes me that the skin system would lend itself beautifully to bridging this communication gap between developers and editors.
class SkinVectorBeta extends SkinVector { public function initPage( OutputPage $out ) { parent::initPage( $out ); $out->addModules( array( 'echo', 'visualeditor' ) ); } }
Any interested editors could enable this skin through user preferences and be able to see exactly what new features are in the pipeline.
Is there any reason we don't currently do this in favour of various experiments and then a sudden push to production which tends a lot of the time to result in a heated Village Pump discussion?