On 21/03/13 20:55, Niklas Laxström wrote:
I've seen a couple of instances where changes to
MediaWiki are blocked
until someone informs the community.
Someone is a volunteer.
Community is actually just the Wikimedia project communities. Or at
least the biggest ones which are expected to complain and where the
complaining would hurt.
This situation seems completely unfair to me. WMF should be able to
communicate upcoming changes itself, not throw it to volunteers.
Volunteers can help, but they should not be responsible for this to
happen.
I would assume that "do it yourself" is usually code for "we don't
consider this deployment to be important enough to spend any time on
it at the moment."
Fair enough, volunteers don't have an automatic right to dictate other
people's priorities, a fact which might need to be communicated with tact.
Also, community managers generally see it as their responsibility to
extract as much work from volunteers as possible, and will ask a
volunteer to do something whether or not a WMF staff member would be
more than happy to do it.
-- Tim Starling