Wikipedia talk:WikiProject JavaScript: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:43, 12 May 2017

Revision as of 22:02, 12 May 2017

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So I think about at least proposing some unit tests to the MediaWiki developers (by [[Behat (computer science)|Behat]] hooks on [[Gerrit (software)|Gerrit]]?), in order limit the breakings, and a bot to identify and organize their reparations at an interwiki scale. [[User:JackPotte|JackPotte]] ([[User talk:JackPotte|talk]]) 21:20, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

:The problem is scale. What we do (and need to do), no longer scales to people just doing their own thing without oversight, linting etc. We (MediaWiki developers) are breaking these things for good reasons, not willy nilly (SIX YEARS for this years removal !!!!). But writing a userscript is easy. Maintaining it for years and years (while you cannot trace who uses it and how often it is used. or if you just got married and now have 2 kids taking up all your time) is not and whoever is left behind gets to clean up his own problems and everyone else's :) (I spent 5 days fixing well over 50 gadgets and scripts myself).

:Part of these breakages, is to force people into a world where these things are going to be easier to trace ([https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/mw-js-deprecate?refresh=1m&orgId=1&from=now-6M&to=now deprecations]), easier to sandbox (one error not bringing down all the other javascript), faster to load, making use of libraries instead of 15 year old globals etc etc. We NEED to move this forward, because it's holding a lot of other stuff back.

:One improvement would be building linting options for the mediawiki libraries into the CodeEditor.

:A second would be further expanding https://github.com/Krinkle/mw-tool-tourbot to be more usable for more people to scan for code that needs to be updated and to and to do pro active cleanup work.

:Gadgets are another part of the answer. globablized gadgets a better answer. globalized gadgets with code review an even better one. The question is, who is going to build it ? And that's my other problem. I have a feeling that we are no longer seeing a lot of technical people join the ranks of Wikipedia anymore. Not as we had between 2001 and 2008. And that generation has largely moved on by now. And I can't blame people for not wanting to build scripts for Wikipedia, if I had learned to build stuff on github, I'd NEVER jump through the Wikipedia hoops either :)

:—[[User:TheDJ|Th<span style="color: green">e</span>DJ]] ([[User talk:TheDJ|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/TheDJ|contribs]]) 22:02, 12 May 2017 (UTC)