"I came across a patch from a user who was keen to move himself from
"Patch contributors" to "Developers" in the MediaWiki CREDITS file
[1]. It had been sitting there for over a year. He doesn't seem to
have been active since. I don't know what to do with it. It made me
think.
Do we have it documented anywhere how we use this credits file and why
we feel the need to distinguish between Developers and Patch
Contributors? It seems like a recipe for disaster in my opinion as it
can only lead to hurt feelings due to contributors feeling unfairly
treated.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Version/Credits leads
with 'We would like to recognize the following persons for their
contribution to MediaWiki." - if someone is not in that list are they
not as important?
If we keep these files we should probably explain the rules to what
adding names looks like within these files and what the process to
adding your name is (can I add myself? Is there a process like getting
+2?)
To take another extreme, we might consider abandoning such a file in
favour of something automatically generated. Things like
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/graphs/contributors do a far
better job at allowing people to see who contributed to a tool and
making people feel like their work is rewarded.
On a slightly related note, can we abandon the practice of putting
names inside files themselves? I see this practice in JavaScript and
PHP files throughout core (grep for @author). As Team Geek [2] (great
read btw) says "unlike other collaborative pieces of creative work...
software keeps changing even after it's "done". So while listing
contributors credits at the end of a movie is a safe and static thing,
attempting to add and remove names from a source file is a
never-ending exercise in insanity". For similar reasons this practice
gives an impression of ownership of a file/code review
responsibilities (which are not always true) and risks hurt feelings.
[1]
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/CREDITS
[2]
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=97…