> > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:01:04 -0400 > From: Chad <innocentkil...@gmail.com> > To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Lua deployed to www.mediawiki.org > Message-ID: > <CADn73rPaG21iOvZQ3pewCyV86qS+=7=pj_obgr7zncnp0+_...@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Tyler Romeo <tylerro...@gmail.com> wrote: >> This is the exact kind of attitude the op-ed in the Signpost is addressing. >> When making major feature decision, such as redoing the entire templating >> system, we cannot just say to editors "oh, if you want some input, go and >> join our mailing list". That's just a passive-aggressive way of pushing >> editors out of the conversation. How many purely editors, i.e., not >> developers, are on this list actively participating in discussion? >> > > Which communities? Engaging N editing communities just doesn't > scale. Nor, to be perfectly honest, do I think its the appropriate > venue. I expect people to join the places technical discussions take > place (this list + mediawiki.org), just as I expect I should have to > join a wiki's discussion forums to discuss content/community things. > I'm perfectly willing to engage anyone on anything I work on, but I > don't want to repeat myself in 20 different places. > > A long time ago, technical discussions happened on Meta. It was > moved off of Meta since there's enough content to warrant its own > wiki. Perhaps we can improve on getting notices out to people (hey, > we're discussing FooBar, come talk with us [here]), but trying to > shift the discussion to hundreds of individual wikis just doesn't work > for me. > > -Chad > If people want to discuss to technical details of something they should join wikitech-l as you suggest. But I don't think others in this thread are asking about where the technical discussion of Lua took place. I think they are asking about the *other* discussion. The one we rarely seem to have which happens before there are labs, or code, or mock-ups. Something like: . . . Dear wikimedia-l, Templates have been horrendously painful for a long time and it seems like I will finally have the time to focus addressing this in the coming year. I know the biggest problem is pages that fail load because timeouts and I hope to generally improve performance. The other things I anticipate address (fill in the blank) about editing and using templates. Also I plan on improve the some backend stuff that is off-topic for this list. The down-side is that to take advantage of these improvements templates will have be re-written in a new way that no one is familiar with. But the good news is I couldn't make harder to write templates I tried! It really shouldn't be that bad because the old template will still work just well/poorly as they did before. So not every template will have to be rewritten in by the new system. We can focus on just re-writing the ones that are most problematic, and if people want to use the new method to replace benign ones it wills their choice. The other con of going this route is that it is a complete rewrite and may take a year or two before deployment. But honestly I don't see a better option to fixing the page that are break like this one. LINK So far I have started a page on MW. Some of it is pretty technical, but this link will take you where I have list the pros and cons of this solution and some feature it may include. LINK Please pass this on to the people who work the most with templates in your communities. I am hoping that those most familiar with templates will add to this list in the next two weeks so I will have the best information to finalize my plans for this. I have already posted this the few places I could think of. So if you can think of a group that would like to know about this and don't already see this message there please inform them. After the discussion at MW is done, I will email a follow to wikimedia-l and wikitech-l to let you know whether this something I will commit to take the lead on right now, and share my firm plans for development and the priorities for feature inclusion. Right now I am committed to nothing except resolving the broken page timeouts. After the follow-up email you will probably will not hear anything about this until there is something to test, or if I have enough testers, maybe not until we start planning deployment. But feel free to poke the talk-page on MW or email me for an update if you start to wonder how things are progressing. . . . Discussion about development need not be a technical discussion. To your other point, I don't think one single instance of repeating yourself in 20 places about a project you plan on spending a year of your life developing is very onerous. This doesn't hold for updates, but It would be nice if there we were better at announcing the beginning of a commitment to a project very widely. That can only make the project more successful. And I think we may agree on this. Birgitte SB PS Forgive me if misrepresented what Lua means to do and how it was approached, in my fake email. I really don't understand exactly what Lua means to do nor its history and I took some wild guesses. I wanted to show the sort of the focus and level of detail of I would like in such a discussion, so the actual elements used were not important. If the my statements are at all accurate for Tim's approach with Lua, then I just made some lucky guesses. More likely I misrepresented where his actual thinking was when he began the project. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
