Gadgets are great for experimentation and innovation but occasionally are enabled by default¹ on a given wiki (and can also be imported to other wikis, by default, without any tracking - T35355). When this happens we must ensure the code quality is kept to the highest possible coding standard. As a member of the developer community it is very unclear what gadgets are enabled by default and on what projects and how they might effect me and where the code lives and what the code looks like.
How to do this is unclear (what tools/processes are needed), but ideally the process of enabling a gadget by default should
- Delay enabling a gadgets by default to give time for feedback
- Allow members of the developer community to review these kind of gadgets beforehand to flag things like xss problems.
- Provide greater transparency of which gadgets are enabled where and when
Notes
¹ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gadgets#Options
See also
- T22153: Implement global gadgets (WMF-wide)
- T31272: Implement Gadgets 2.0
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/74283 for broader discussion from 2013 (when the "default" option was implemented in the gadgets extension, for T15742: Allow for gadgets to be turned on by default)
- T60236: No longer allow gadgets to be turned on by default for all users on Wikimedia sites