On Thu, 28 Aug 2025 at 13:02, Maciej Jaros <e...@wp.pl> wrote:
> I don’t want to sound nitpicky, but the on-wiki documentation on
> mediawiki.org is considered the official documentation.
Clearly, indeed, you consider it official. I don't think of those
pages as the primary documentation of the database, and more
importantly, the database's raw SQL is not and has never been intended
to be a supported API. Users are intended to use MediaWiki's PHP code,
which enforces deprecation and access rights. The fact that WMCS
provides raw, direct (ish) access to these tables is implicitly (but
apparently not obviously) at-risk.
> Even if the policy didn’t cover this, I think it’s safe to say that nobody
> reads all the release notes of past versions before building tools or making
> queries in Quarry and similar places.
Indeed, that is a problem. I'm not sure how we as a movement can
better support people in these circumstances.
> Also, the policy you mentioned states:
>
> > Any relevant documentation in the Git repository and on mediawiki.org MUST
> > be updated once the change is approved. (Using alert templates on the
> > documentation page, such as {{Deprecated}}).
You are indeed technically correct. If you wish to go shout at people
for patches written 13 years ago for not following a policy adopted 5
years ago, you can, but I don't think this is a valuable course of
action. It would certainly have been better if the on-wiki fork of the
documentation had been updated at the time (or since!), but I don't
believe most Quarry users are reading that version of the
documentation either, frankly.
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester (he/him or they/themself)
Wikimedia Foundation
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