Amir E. Aharoni, 12/07/2012 12:42:
What's needed is a medium to announce important impending technical
changes, which require local changes. [...]
We could just blame the projects for not caring enough, or we could
come up with a more effective solution.
You're right that this is an important problem to address and your
examples are very good, however I think they're not about a
communication problem. The example problems you've mentioned are just
impossible to solve for most wikis whatever communication you have with
them, because they're too complex; the solution here is to make things
simpler.
I don't know about right-to-left stuff, but protocol-relative URLs have
been fixed only with a "central" direct intervention to fix mistakes of
local wikis (and WMF staffers, even)[1] and RL is helped only by good
documentation for JS gurus[2] or, on most (helpless) wikis, again by a
central effort.[3]
We surely need ways to spread the word better and especially
during the "emergencies" such as deploy a mailing list can be the way but
surely it's not good for brainstorming or to gather feedback in a useful way
(compare https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech which is lately serving this
purpose, to my surprise I have to say, thanks to the effort of some users).
Thank you, I didn't know that page. I'll try to start following it.
In practice, it's harder to follow a wiki page than a mailing list.
But maybe that's just my own feeling.
Of course the wiki page is not good for announcements, but it's better
than a mailing list for all the other things you mentioned. If there are
some committed "maintainers" and/or a working IRC channel ([[Tech]] is
now tightly connected with the revamped #wikimedia-tech, which would be
improved by [4]), it can work although all attempts have failed in the
past.[5]
Nemo
[1]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards%27_noticeboard/Archives/2012-04#Fixing_HTTPS_on_Wikimedia_wikis>
[2]
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Migration_guide_%28users%29>
[3]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Krinkle/Le_Tour_de_Wik%C3%AD/2011_Resource_Walker>
or even better things like
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Salvatore_Ingala/Notes> to reduce
the codebase to be maintained.
[4] <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16043#c19>
[5] Today I've closed two problem report pages, see
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_talk:Test_reports>
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