[Foundation-l] tech team - content community bottleneck

Fri Jan 11 20:26:13 UTC 2008

Domas Mituzas wrote:
> 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.

200% agree.

> 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.

And we would do well to refuse doing such thing. Foundation would become 
a huge bottleneck and community will then begin complaining that we are 
hindering the development of the projects.

> 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.

Could not agree more.

Ant