On 14 August 2014 16:27, Richard Farmbrough <rich...@farmbrough.co.uk> wrote:
> 3. The ongoing question of software development. The WMF is supposed to "to > empower and engage" the communities to disseminate content "effectively > and globally." It is not supposed to run with its own agenda. Bugs and > feature requests by the community are allowed to stand unattended for years > - one was closed (WONTFIX) because of an off-hand comment made by a dev on > a mailing list! Meanwhile "nice to have" features absorb apparently huge > amounts of financial and staff resoruces. In the style re-work, extensive > feedback was solicited and provided - and ignored when it didin't suit. > (Notably a/b testing, mixing serif and sans, and using typefaces where the > glyphs are more distinct) Although I concur with Erik's and WMF's actions in this particular case (and I really don't see how it could have worked out any other way), it's worth noting for the general case that local communities *do* need to be able to add local enhancements to MediaWiki - because the developers, WMF and volunteer, simply don't scale. This has been observable even for simple administrative actions that happen to require shell use, let alone adding new functionality. So locally-editable site JavaScript, for locally-important gadgets and so forth, is in fact something that's needed. This particularly applies to non-Wikipedia wikis that get no paid developer attention from WMF. Of course, in an ideal world this would be later reviewed and possibly centralised. But blocking it in general will immediately make Wikimedia sites worse, not better, in important ways. - d. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
