Le 10/08/2014 10:27, svetlana a écrit :
I feel that having development carried out by
"employees" hinders
programming the same software as a hobby: for instance, they work in
a single language, and don't need localised documentation
We have developers across all continents with a wide range of native
languages. We just fallback to a common language which happens to be
English.
If the computer industry started in France, we would probably all be
using french to communicate and that would become a de facto
requirement. Keep in mind that all languages are based on English and
most of their documentation / source code comments are also in English.
I definitely understand how it is a barrier of entry for a hobbyist
developer, but lack of English skill is a different problem which is out
of scope of our mission. The way we mitigate it is that we have
developers fluent in a bunch of languages and, I at least, enjoy
helping/replying/guiding developers in our native language.
As for our documentation, the user/sysadmin guides are on
mediawiki.org.
That has been done for a reason: let folks document MediaWiki instead of
the overbusy developers. That also opens possibilities to at least
translate the user/sysadmin guides.
Regarding the documentation shipped inside Mediawiki core, it is based
on source code comments and I don't see us maintaining a translation for
them. We don't even properly maintain our doc as-is!
there are other (which i haven't shaped properly
yet) differences of
architecture of comminity-run tech projects and tech projects run by
employees, which make getting involved as a hobby harder
for instance, i could not make a difference to a big linux distro run
by a corporation (or using one as an upstream)
which is why I'm not very supportive of any plans that involve more
employees at WMF Engineering either
I hope this way to put it is slightly more clear than it was before
I am not sure how it applies to MediaWiki development process. We have a
fair share of volunteers involved, and more than a handful of them that
have very deep knowledge about wiki and propose very useful code. There
are some area of codes I would ask volunteers to review, I trust them
more than myself or other employees to handle the review and make sure
it is not going to break the Wikimedia cluster.
For beginners developers, the barrier entry is much higher. I agree. But
I think it is more related to how complicated MediaWiki is than some
localization issues or WMF having paid employees.
--
Antoine "hashar" Musso