Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment--20150814190019/@comment-1065656-20150815164635

Nerfmaster8 wrote: if you bothered to actually read DaNASCAT's above response, then you would have found that 4% of the 330,000 wikis constantly change their JS and that is 13,200 wikis by calculation. perhaps you like to figure out errors on your own if the editor doesn't throw a warning, sometimes you may still need to go ask a competent user for help so what's the harm in checking say imports are correct?

That was a rhetorical question.

Out of those thirteen thousand wikis, how many actually have major problems that warrant Wikia Staff stepping in and having to fix it for them?

I'm in support of having to have code review for the cases where some eight-year-old admin adds every single script on the damn site to his wiki and then wonders why his main page redirects to editing the chat welcome message, but to force admins and developers who have been writing javascript for wikis for years on end seems absolutely absurd and counter productive.

Deadcoder wrote: Personally, I think that some users should be able to bypass the auditing. If you've shown that you routinely make good edits and are capable at Javascript, then your script edits should be whitelisted, and not need to be audited.

This is definitely something I can agree with.

Dessamator wrote: Dragonfree97 wrote:

The whole thing just reeks of over-protectivity. How many wikis use custom JavaScript? And how often do JavaScript incidents occur? To force all users to have their code submitted for review just seems like overkill. I think only people who don't really understand javascript can make claims that each "semi-colon" requires review. Even if one doesn't want to use the javascript console, one can still use greasemonkey or tampermonkey to make any changes without submitting them to a wiki. Making the username/user.js completely unnecesary. In fact, submitting every change to a wiki is a bad practice that will in some cases make certain wikia features stop working in the event of a script error breaking functionality and in some cases breaking the TOU.

There are apps like jslint and json lint that can quickly identify simple mistakes like that anyway.

Obviously I'm exaggerating to express my point.

Dessamator wrote: If one really wants to take it to the next level, there's nothing stopping anyone from downloading the whole mediawiki/wikia's source code and debugging it locally. Anyone who changes javascript, is immediately forcing everyone in the wikia to trust them, based on nothing but the idea that an "admin"  who more often than not uses a "pseudonymn" is trustworthy.

Another reason to introduce a 'code-editor' group that only Wikia Staff themselves can give out to people.

Dessamator wrote: Actually one could argue that the current way of changing javascript goes entirely against a wiki. In a true wiki every single change (including js) is peer reviewed and accepted or rejected. The reality is that unlike a normal article there are  fewer competent peer reviewers for js.

Ultimately, even mediawiki developers aren't allowed to merge code without peer review, and they are far more competent than any wiki user.

I don't think it's fair to compare MediaWiki to Javascript on one wiki. MediaWiki is a standard which billions of pages across the internet rely on, local JS affects only a few thousand at most.