Honestly, I find the "not in the annual
plan" thing more damning than the
actual issue at hand.
The core competency of WMF is supposed to be keeping the site running.
WMF does a lot of things, some of them very useful, others less so, but at
its core its mission is to keep the site going. Everything else should be
secondary to that.
It should be obvious that running a 300 TB+ media store servicing 70
billion requests a month requires occasional investment and maintenance
And yet, this was not only not in this year's annual plan, it has been
ignored in the annual plan for many many years. We didn't get to this state
by just 1 year of neglect.
Which raises the question - If wmf is not in the business of keeping the
Wikimedia sites going, what is it in the business of?
On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 6:01 AM Kunal Mehta <legoktm(a)debian.org> wrote:
Hi,
On 1/1/22 12:10, Asaf Bartov wrote:
It seems to me there are *very few* people who
could change status
quo,
not much more than a handful: the
Foundation's executive leadership
(in
its annual planning work, coming up this first
quarter of 2022), and
the
Board of Trustees.
If the goal is to get paid WMF staff to fix the issues, then you're
correct. However, I do not believe that as a solution is healthy
long-term. The WMF isn't perfect and I don't think it's desirable to
have a huge WMF that tries to do everything and has a monopoly on
technical prioritization.
The technical stack must be co-owned by volunteers and paid staff from
different orgs at all levels. It's significantly more straightforward
now for trusted volunteers to get NDA/deployment access than it used to
be, there are dedicated training sessions, etc.
Given that the multimedia stack is neglected and the WMF has given no
indication it intends to work on/fix the problem, we should be
recruiting people outside the WMF's paid staff who are interested in
working on this and give them the necessary access/mentorship to get it
done. Given the amount of work on e.g. T40010[1] to develop an
alternative SVG renderer, I'm sure those people exist.
Take moving Thumbor to Buster[2] for example. That requires
forward-porting some Debian packages written Python, and then testing in
WMCS that there's no horrible regressions in newer imagemagick, librsvg,
etc. I'm always happy to mentor people w/r to Debian packaging (and have
done so in the past), and there are a decent amount of people in our
community who know Python, and likely others from the Commons community
who would be willing to help with testing and dealing with whatever
fallout.
So I think the status quo can be changed by just about anyone who is
motivated to do so, not by trying to convince the WMF to change its
prioritization, but just by doing the work. We should be empowering
those people rather than continuing to further entrench a WMF technical
monopoly.
[1]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T40010
[2]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T216815
-- Legoktm
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