On Wednesday, August 20, 2014, Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
At Wikimania, we had a good conversation and a proposal (that was basically agreed upon by everyone in the room IIRC!) about creating a "gold standard" for extensions, judging them based on their code quality, compatibility with MediaWiki versions, tests, etc.
I was in that room and I agree that defining and implementing this "gold standard" is a good idea. For what I recall, factors considered included objective facts like compatibility tested with Jenkins, support for LTS, etc. Still, I don't see this as a substitution of user feedack, with its potential drawbacks but also with the uniqueness that such human feedback provides.
Whenever we have this type of discussion, Wordpress is mentioned as a good example of a catalog of plugins with information useful for Wordpress users (meaning Wordpress admins, just like in the case of MediaWiki). Look for instance http://wordpress.org/plugins/feedweb/
Requires: 3.0 or higher Compatible up to: 3.9.2 Last Updated: 2014-8-21 Downloads: 90,268
((((This first block is quite objective))))
Ratings 4 stars 4.8 out of 5 stars 5 stars http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/feedweb?filter=5 24 4 stars http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/feedweb?filter=4 1 3 stars http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/feedweb?filter=3 0 2 stars http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/feedweb?filter=2 0 1 stars http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/feedweb?filter=1 1
((((The ratings we are talking about, they show also the amount of votes, it does draw a picture about this plugin.))))
Author Feedweb Research http://profiles.wordpress.org/feedweb/ 1 plugin
((((You can see how prolific this developer is, and check data & feedback on their other plugins, if you wish))))
Support 3 of 3 support threads in the last two months have been resolved.
((((We could apply something similar with Bugzilla/Phabricator, and perhaps even Flow one day))))
Got something to say? Need help? View support forum http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/feedweb
Compatibility WordPress +Plugin = Works! 4 people say it works. 0 people say it's broken.
((((This little module is especially useful, as it attempts to tell you about specific combinations of Wordpress and plugin versions, according to other users -- imagine if Jenkins could vote there as well))))
IMO, that would be way more useful to me than arbitrary user ratings.
Why not having both?