Nobody seems to have replied to this thread in about a week, which I think indicates a problem, so I'm gonna poke a bit here.
Rob Lanphier wrote: > As you probably know, we're trying to get into the habit of providing > a monthly overview of all WMF-sponsored engineering activity. The > September update was posted to the techblog here: > http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/wmf-engineering/ I think these updates are fantastic. And I think there's been some very real forward progress over the past month, in a lot of tech-related areas. (I don't completely understand why Wikimedia needs two blogs, but that's a matter for a different day.) > For October, we'd like to draft this in public so as to get the > information out a little sooner, and to give you all the opportunity > to help out. Here's where we're drafting this: > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Engineering_Overview_October_2010 There's been no activity on that page since September 23 (a few hours after this thread was started). It's nearly October 1. To me, that indicates a problem. > Here's a very simple way you can help. If you see something on the > list that you're interested in, but don't see the status for yet, ping > one of us, then be bold and add what you learn to the appropriate wiki > page. If you do know the status, by all means add it. > > Another useful thing to do: you'll notice that many of the project > pages that the status post links to are pretty sparse. Same rules > apply there. We'd love to get help keeping this up to date. The current reality is that the paid developers/sysadmins have been isolated from the community. You seem to be essentially asking people to guess or make-up the current status of a lot of these projects, most of which aren't even known about outside paid developers/sysadmins (the Virginia data center, improved ops monitoring, etc.). The operations section might be a bit of an exception (obviously a good portion of the user base is familiar with the Pending Changes trial, for example), but in a lot of these areas, only a small number of people know the actual, current status. Everyone else can either guess (and then rely on Cunningham's Law[1]) or leave the page alone (which seems to be the option that most people are taking). Wikimedia has been having weekly (or fortnightly) status meetings about most of the items you listed on MediaWiki.org, but the notes are being held on Wikimedia's installation of EtherPad. Either document this EtherPad installation (I'm not even sure if the URL is supposed to be public, so I'll omit it here) or stop using it and post all of the notes directly on MediaWiki.org. These notes in EtherPad are (by far) the most up-to-date and helpful pages for tracking the status of projects that I've seen, but I doubt more than a dozen people outside of Wikimedia Foundation staff have any idea they exist. Though, perhaps a bit ironically, I haven't seen (m)any ops-related notes on EtherPad, as far as I remember, so that still might be an area in which only one or two people can give an accurate update. Again, I think the progress over the past month has been great, and I mean that. People are opening up a bit, some secret (or "secret") channels are being deprecated, code review is starting to pick up, and there are some great, necessary status updates on this list and foundation-l regarding projects that users care about. However, if you want people to get involved in maintaining these blog posts, they need to have access to the necessary resources. And even then, you'll probably still need some sort of incentive for people to work on these. Most companies and organizations use a paycheck, but perhaps in Wikimedia's case, something simple like giving the primary contributor(s) the blog post byline would push people into action. Another idea is to work with the "Signpost"; these people are already pushing out a tech report weekly and have been doing so for years. My two cents. MZMcBride [1] http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2010/05/word-of-the-week-cu nninghams-law.html _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
