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Eugene Zelenko wrote:
There are many signs of miscommunications between
technical side of
WMF operations and outside worlds (users, administrators, external
projects): periodical rattling on Planet Wikimedia, frustrations on
TranslateWiki, almost impermanently growing number of bug reports in
Bugzilla.
Typical example may include:
1) There is approved project X which still not created for Y days
For a long time, some site admin things like new project setups and
configuration tweaks just weren't on the official agenda; every once in
a while someone would go through a clear a few things out... but not
necessarily all of it, and not necessarily on any kind of schedule.
As we're expanding the core staff and are better able to organize things
beyond just staying online, we'll get better at these "boring" but
important sorts of things that need to be properly maintained to make
the site not just running, but *awesome*.
New wiki setups and config tweaks are now part of Rob's regular sysadmin
maintenance assignments; we've gotten through a bunch in the last month,
and should be able to keep the queue a lot shorter from now on with a
regular schedule.
2) Why new translations are not propagated to project
X
Translations are propagated to all our sites along with all other
software updates.
3) Bug reports with opened years ago with several
duplications
Obviously we'd like to fix those up. ;)
Definitely technical stuff members are limited
resource. And even
trivial fixes or problems may took much more time then expected. Code
changes reviewing require efforts. But outside world don't know what
is going on and could only make uneducated guesses and in best case
scenario perceive technical stuff as black box
I think will be good idea to introduce some kind of technical stuff
reporting and future planning (may be located on WMF site). It'll
provide approximate answer for question 1; explain clearly situation
with 2 (like "rXYZ introduced database scheme changes, currently
updating WMF servers"). This will also highlight and communicate
priorities to general public.
This is pretty much what I try to do (not always as successfully as I
plan ;) on my blog:
http://leuksman.com/log/
of which wiki-related posts are replicated on the Planet Wikimedia
aggregator:
http://en.planet.wikimedia.org/
Also development road map for next quarter/year may be
considered.
Indeed, we should have some more solidly visible plans going forward,
with a number of explicitly planned projects going on...
Possible solution for problem 3:
* WMF may consider to allocate some part of development budget to
outside developers. It may be in form of bug fixing bounties, gifts or
sponsoring travel/accommodation for participation in
Wikimania/MediaWiki developers conference.
We do have an outside contracting budget, which for this year has gone
to taking on a number of our volunteer developers to hack away on some
bigger ongoing projects.
For instance, Erik Zachte's statistics work and Aaron Schulz's work on
Flagged Revisions are being funded out of this; I'm sponsoring Andrew
Garrett to tidy up some of the Configure and AbuseFilter work for making
some on-wiki admin work flow a lot easier to deal with, and we'll be
seeing some fun mobile development coming up soon...
There's also a "volunteer development" budget for little bits here and
there but this is a less fully developed idea so far. :)
I definitely will be trying to organize some hackfest events, some of
which we should be able to get some support funding for, and we'll see
what other sorts of internship-style things we can arrange...
* Advertisement of "Google Summer of Code"
jobs on WMF projects.
We may or may not do Google Summer of Code itself next year, since we've
had a lot of trouble getting enough motivated mentors to really support
the student projects.
We'll see how it's looking in a few months... :)
- -- brion
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