Well, with the release notes freshly trimmed for 1.14, it seems like a
good time to bring this up. A while back, someone or other removed
references in specific RELEASE-NOTES features to who submitted the
patch to fix the feature. Brion reverted that, calling it bad form.
The thing is, though, that's exactly the policy we follow for everyone
who contributes to the project: there's no mention in the release
notes. The only way you could find out who actually develops
MediaWiki at present is by hunting through commit logs and trying to
match up names with commit aliases somehow. Special:Version is very
incomplete, and most of the people listed aren't currently active.
A lot of projects mention who contributed to specific versions, and I
think it would be perfectly reasonable for us to do the same. I would
suggest two sections of contributors: people who contributed code to
the specific version, and people who contributed translations. Each
one could be ordered alphabetically by last name, or some other
criterion if people think of one. (Like putting Brion and Tim at top,
and maybe putting regular committers above one-time patch submitters.)
If someone contributes a patch via Bugzilla or whatever, they get
added to the list like anyone who personally committed code, not
inline with the feature they added.
What does everyone think?