John Vandenberg wrote: > ===System administrators=== > 19) System administrators are responsible for the MediaWiki software > configuration of the projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, such as > English Wikipedia. They make changes to configuration based on a mix > of Wikimedia Foundation, technical and project considerations. While > their decisions may affect the English Wikipedia, those decisions are > beyond the jurisdiction of the English Wikipedia community and its > Arbitration Committee. The local community may, of course, challenge > these decisions, but must at all times respect them, Complains should > be lodged at meta forums, such as Bugzilla, #wikimedia-tech, > wikitech-l, foundation-l and meta, each having their own processes and > customs which should be respected.
Perhaps also note that the community can request changes on configuration (which may then be rejected by reasons like inefficiency of the proposed solution, going agaisnt WMF principles...). > ===Deprecation of MediaWiki functionality=== > 21) The MediaWiki software used on the Wikimedia projects, and > configuration of that software, is the responsibility of the > developers and system administrators. > In the same way that system administrators are the decision makers to > enable new functionality, deprecation or removal of MediaWiki > functionality is a technical decision, and implementation of that > decision may have technical implications that need to be considered. > The project community should engage the technical team in decisions > which relate to use the software. > > Policies, procedures and the manual of style may govern how and when > the software may be used, however decisions to deprecate or disable > software features are best left in the hands of the technical staff. > > Regards, > John Vandenberg Consultation with the technical staff is recommended before doing technical changes, so the consequences are fully understood. 'Trivial' changes may degrade the site. 'Optimization' changes may be useless :) While enabling a never-used feature is a difficult process, disabling one is hardly a problem. Mediawiki developers try hard to maintain all the used functionality, and is unlikely to decide by themselves disabling a feature actively used (although such events can't be completely discarded, eg. as an effect of a rewrite). _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
