Talk:MediaWiki 1.19/Roadmap

Communications
Completely amateur and informal ideas here; I've been looking at the communications strategy, and it looks really solid - although one thing I'd change is that we should notify the main IRC channels as well as the admin ones (so, #wikipedia-en as well as #wikipedia-en-admins, say); non-admin editors are just as likely to have third-party gadgets installed.

Something I had been thinking with 1.18 was the use of VPT as a reporting venue for tech issues. It's great as one centralised location, but it's also used for a heck of a lot of other things too by the community. One disadvantage of using it for new deployments is that the page quickly becomes clogged with bugs and issues, which is frustrating to editors trying to deal with other threads, and also to editors as a whole (you quickly get bloat and long loading times). What I was thinking is the following; lets use enwiki as the example. We create a dedicated bug reporting page, either for general bugs or just for the 1.19 release, and advertise that at all the noticeboards, through WP:CENT, the community portal, a watchlist notice, the IRC channels, the mailing lists, so on and so forth, and a note at the *top* of VPT (with the length of the page, normal sections get swallowed and vanish). People with bugs to report are sent towards this dedicated page, providing a single venue for all your buggy needs and reducing the pressure on more general-purpose noticeboards.

Mark pointed me towards this, which looks like an awesome way of formatting it. I'm not 100% on the community protocols for randomly starting a new noticeboard, so we might want to just check with Maggie that people won't shout at us, assuming we decide to do this. Thoughts? Okeyes (WMF) 15:23, 26 January 2012 (UTC)


 * People will go to local village pumps to complain in any case, because they aren't the proper place and they're not able to understand where to go (even understandably; think of the lots of wiki-specific gadgets and such which add to the chaos).
 * A thing worth consideration is a CentralNotice of some sort. It can be restricted to sysops or very active users to reduce damage. :-) Nemo 16:26, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
 * That's true; hopefully the thumping great notice at the top of the VPs would have some impact on that, along with me sitting there and telling every single complainant "go here". Okeyes (WMF) 16:31, 26 January 2012 (UTC)