Since global preferences are only for the wiki the user is on, we should give them a message to tell them that there might be preferences they cannot make global using this Special:GlobalPreferences page as they are not available for that wiki.
Also see: T197908: CheckMatrix is not future proof.
@IKhitron: Please avoid mass-subscribing folks and structure your tasks by providing 1) steps to reproduce, 2) expected outcome, and 3) actual outcome. Thanks.
Removed the parent task as this feature request does not block deploying GlobalPrefs on production.
Hi @Aklapper, as far as I know, from what I was said here, I must create a subtask every time the problem comes from some another task. Are you saying I was disinformed? If so, when exactly subtasks should be created? Thank you.
I'll add what you asked in a minute.
Hello @Aklapper. The issue seems to me clearly explained and detailed. The request for reproduction steps does not seem necessary here, except to make the description of "open this page, see that this is present" more cumbersome, which is a perfect repetition of what was already explained. Thanks.
@IKhitron New issues require new tickets. Which is not the same as sub tickets. subtickets are 'a part of' a parent task. Normally, they would be resolved before a parent task ever can be resolved. Here the parent task can be resolved without implementing this ticket.
For example, It includes education extension notifications only on wikis that have this extension deployed. [..] This means, for example, that all extensions in the world should be there, in any wiki, so this page will be the same on all wikis.
I presume this is because checking 650 wikis is an extremely expensive operation, and loading the config for each of these wikis is the only way of figuring out all options that are possible. This is a hard problem to solve and I suspect it was therefor decided not to be important enough for the short term.
Typical one of those things that would have been easy if people could start from scratch, but there is an existing infrastructure to how the wikis are managed that likely makes this a hard problem to fix (and with too little return value considering the expected, relatively low, number of users of global preferences).
You do not need check all wikis, just to have a hardcoded list of extensions that use global preferences.
We don't hardcode things, that isn't flexible, the setup changes several times per week.
Sure. But if it's too heavy to check it once a day, checking today and every ten years is still much better than nothing.
@IKhitron This was something we discussed in the team when we were working on the project. TheDJ is right that this is technically challenging to do. There is another reason - it can cause confusion to people when they see preferences which appear in Special:GlobalPreferences page but not on Special:Preferences page. Showing the Education extension related preferences might cause people to wonder if that preference has been deployed to that wiki too.
It's easy to grasp for people who understand how extensions work but not for everyone.
Another thing is that there are not a lot of preferences which are available on only some wikis and are useful as global preferences. People who work on education (I.e. people who utilize that extension) will go to their Special:GlobalPreferences on their wiki and turn it on - but for someone who works primarily on mediawiki.org will not have to worry about it since it doesn't affect them. It should not be something you have to check every day.
The goal should not be to have every single preference global - but rather only preferences that matter to you should be global.
There are a lot. Think about Structured discussion as Beta. Or FlaggedRevs has a lot. About another thing - if so, create one special page on meta linked from all preferences pages is indeed a good idea.
It might be a good idea but it really is a lot of work to make that happen. The extension right now works the exact same way on all wikis. To customize it to work in a different, special way on one specific wiki would be challenging.
At this point GlobalPreferences has taken over a year to complete and if we put in more work into this project, we will not be able to work on the other projects from the community wishlist survey, sadly.
If so, can you, at least, add to sp:GP pages a warning: the page does not include all the preferences. To find them, edit this page on all 900 wikis in the world. Or, instead, if there is somewhere a wiki with all extensions that use global preferences deployed, to add a link there on these pages? Thank you.
As I said above, I don't think people would have to go to every single wiki to mark every preference as global. That's not a good use of their time. They should only mark preferences that matter to them - and those only exist on wikis they are active on. Checking the GlobalPreferences page on two or three wikis should suffice, if that.
I do not agree, but very well, it can be a good start. Add a warning to special:global preferences that it not includes preferences of extensions that are not deployed on this wiki (without any details), and users can find them on wikis where they are.
@IKhitron Also see my notes in T197908#4431634 which relate to this ticket as written.
I think your idea about adding the warning is not bad. @Mooeypoo do you have thoughts on this?