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Since we're looking for better ways to communicate with gadget, JS, and CSS devs who work on different WMF sites, what do you think would be a good way to attack this problem? Where could we have posted our plans so that you would have an opportunity to weigh in?
A big part of the problem seems to be that each wiki has (till RL2 anyway) its own copy of gadgets and its own developers who don't really collaborate.
We're working on addressing this, but I'm curious to hear what you think would be a good approach.
Whatever the solution ends up becoming, I'm sure it will involve centralizing communication on mediawiki.org, since this is already the place to go for everything specific to MediaWiki. Already, it seems communication specific to an upcoming version of MediaWiki is gravitating towards pages like this one.
However, MediaWiki pages are isolated from each other. The best mass-communication model I know of is forums. My favorite is SMF, with a BIG list of recent posts on its main page. It makes it very easy to get an idea of what is happening in one glance. It beats mailing lists, wikis, email, IRC, and anything else I can think of. In fact, declines in IRC usage seem to be correlated with increases in forum usage, on a global scale.
I view LiquidThreads as a step away from the proper solution. Forums as a communication model are well-proven, widely used, and easy for anyone to feel comfortable with. Wikis and mailing lists have a barrier to entry, and other quirks that do not make it easy to participate, or gain information from them. Being ephemeral is just one problem.
MediaWiki nirvana will be achieved when talk pages are linked to SMF forums. I have heard some good reasons from people who disagree with me about why we should stay pure-wiki, but despite their good reasons, I keep wishing we didn't have to reinvent the wheel when forums are already so good at facilitating communication.
JEDL is our first attempt at this. I'm going to be finding a way to contact gadget authors and point them to this resource. Hopefully we'll begin to have a better community develop.
