[Foundation-l] tech team - content community bottleneck

Fri Jan 11 17:51:35 UTC 2008

Hi!

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the developer who made the  
> switch
> is not an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation. Take it to wikitech- 
> l or
> wikien-l, please.

Well, there is quite a bit of foundation issue here, and I'd like to  
explaim some general projects bits (that are neither technology, nor  
single-project related):

See, Jens is not employee, though has been the developer with most  
community-facing attitude. He has been implementing, at his own will,  
most of community requests. He is a volunteer, and has been dedicated  
to our ideals more and longer than most of us.
When members of communities decide to attack with "This developer has  
exhibited extremely poor judgment and a gross disregard for the  
WIkipedia community" and nobody takes that back or apologizes, it is  
no fun to continue doing all these small things.

Foundation doesn't really facilitate this process at the moment - it  
is all left to individual care - both filtering, evaluating if change  
X would successfully follow all few hundreds policy pages, and  
implementation, what often requires extensive code review and  
familiarity of our operating environment.
Do note, that community representatives come not only with these  
changes - various 'oh noes, remove this from site' requests are quite  
common, and every of them are questionable.

If people will be going to raise such huge flames and attack  
implementors for actually doing the job, we will really ask  
foundation to facilitate not only all the evaluation of every request  
that comes in from communities, but to provide with implementor  
resources too.

We have far more fun things (our jobs, lives, even wikipedia  
technology development) to do than go into endless debates with  
people who favor endless debates, sorry.

-- 
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]