[Labs-l] RFC: Webtools setup

Sun Feb 17 16:37:37 UTC 2013

On 02/17/2013 11:10 AM, Platonides wrote:
>> >We do require admin interaction and manual "review" to add
>> >feeds to Planet Wikimedia, and still get turn-around times
>> >in the range of minutes, so I don't think that we should
>> >spend much thought in optimizing the creation times of new
>> >tools:-).
> Well, perhaps if it was just a few minutes..., but  zero-time is still
> infinitely faster. You don't want to put off that developer that awoke
> at 5 am with a neat idea for a tool just because nobody was there to
> approve its creation.:)

I work under the design philosophy that any end-user service that 
requires human intervention for its normal use case is a bug that needs 
fixing.  There may be cases where fixing the bug is actually more 
trouble than living with it (as was suggested regarding bugtracking), 
but it's a bug nonetheless.

Automating is a fixed cost; manual processing is an unbounded cost 
against a finite resource.  :-)

-- Marc