Hi Tim, So that's exactly how I understand it. All programmers who seemed to be good enough were hired and now work as employees, while people who are working on their own have low priority (simply are ignored). That's why I say this philosophy kills the idea of open source, while it's surely good for foundation itself.
There might be people who already have some work, don't wish to be employed by foundation (but want to help with the project, even if they are strange enough they don't demand money for that) or are just not good enough to be hired, it's clearly easier for foundation to assign interesting projects to paid staff and ignore the "newbies who could break things or strangers from internet who seems to know some stuff, but could break stuff as well as long as they are just some strangers who no one really knows, therefore it's hard to rely on them". In fact I don't disagree with this (I work in business environment and understand this philosophy), I am just trying to say that it turns mediawiki to product of "WMF company" from open source software driven by volunteers which it was in past. It should be clearly mentioned somewhere on guidelines for developers that attempts to create software which is supposed to be deployed to foundation sites will be likely overlooked. On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 2:45 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > On 04/04/12 18:27, Svip wrote: >> My NaturalLanguageList extension[1] has been queued for code review >> since March 2010.[2] And I still believe WMF wikis like Wiktionary >> and Commons would greatly benefit from such an extension. At least >> until the Lua-wikicode thing gets worked out. > > I think it's pretty likely that the Lua feature will be live before > NaturalLanguageList gets looked at again. NaturalLanguageList was not > sufficiently inspiring to get included in the roadmap. > > On 04/04/12 19:06, Petr Bena wrote: >> My point is that if review of 15 lines of code, takes 6+ months, there >> is very likely a reason for improvement of current process, which may >> look as "working". > > Larger things with more benefits tend to get a higher priority than > smaller things. So it's usually quicker to get 1500 lines of code > reviewed than 15. > > In another post: >> Yes, in past it worked. I don't know what is broken now, but it >> apparently doesn't work anymore. > > WMF basically hired every MediaWiki developer with a significant > amount of motivation and community trust, and then assigned > interesting projects to them all. The senior developers who used to > mentor community members and review contributed extensions now mentor > teams of employees and review code written internally. > > "20% time" is an attempt to correct broader related trends, but > perhaps we need a more project-oriented approach within our 20% time > policy in order to encourage mentoring and start the pipeline of > contributed extensions moving again. > > Personally, I've found it difficult to find the time and motivation to > bring projects such as VipsScaler and the Score extension through to > completion, even though I'm invested in them and personally care very > much about the problems they address. > > -- Tim Starling > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
