Billinghurst
<billinghurst(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Ryan,
While admins will always be protective of their patch, especially if something breaks
universally, none of us wishes to impede progress and we want to know how we can help.
-> Make us do our homework
-> Give us time to marshal resources, and
-> Have expectations that we should be organised to help.
If we cannot do that, then it is somewhat upon our heads if you have to do what you have
to do.
Frankly, from my experience as sysop at plwiki (not a sister project, though, but I did
some of the css/js work for pl* sisters), I'd rather recommend to explain a bit
(like "say who you are"), but go ahead with the changes. Maybe a single page
on meta will do. The problem will be with non-English projects, as some people
may not read English at all, like some of the quite MediaWiki-savvy admins
in the projects for smaller languages in the former USSR.
Giving time and having much discussion serves little point, since from my experience
those volunteers who spent lots of time on building those scripts now how little
time to re-write them or review them (as many of stuff simply needs
to be deleted). Some may react badly, like just reverting changes because
"it works". Well, it works in a way, and very often some strange effect
appear (mainly because changed loading order of js/css).
I am all for opening up extensions for sister projects - [[Extension:Proofread]]
improved situation at many wikisources, I would envision we have
more sister-project-related extensions in the SVN, even if they
are CSS- or JS- only (or mostly). This gives core developers a chance
to better understand of the impact they make and gives them the
opportunity to fix problems themselves in a cross-repository sweeping
commits with proper commit logs.
//Marcin