Antoine,

Allow me to explain my motivations a bit. Perhaps it will become clearer then. :-)

As a team, we have responsibilities. For example, that task that's on there right now is a problem caused by our actions; we pulled that extension for security reasons, then decided we couldn't reenable it due to design issues. Therefore our actions have caused a very real regression in our user experience. As the product manager, I find these regressions concerning, and we have a responsibility to fix them.

Right now, my only recourse to fix these user experience regressions is to ask politely for someone from the team to help me. I typically get a lukewarm response to these requests. Meanwhile, I get a fair amount of abuse directed at me by volunteers for not fixing these problems, because I am the public face of the team and it (outwardly) looks like we don't care to fix these relatively simple problems. Sure, it sucks for us to do these random tasks, but it sucks hard for our users too. We lose a lot of credibility with some of our volunteers for it.

So what I'm trying to do here is make it as easy as humanely possible for you guys, the overworked engineers, to pick these tasks up and get them done. At the same time, I don't want to get sucked into maintaining control over the task list, so mediawiki.org was the simplest solution.

I hope that helps explain things a bit.

Thanks,
Dan

On 10 April 2014 09:03, Antoine Musso <amusso@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Le 10/04/2014 00:53, Dan Garry a écrit :
>
> The list can be found
> at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Platform_product_microtasks, and could
> be thought of as "annoying little bugs for more experienced developers".

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Annoying_little_bugs is a nice page, I
point our India volunteers to it constantly (no clue if it has any
effects though).

I tend to dislike MediaWiki to maintains backlog lists.  Maybe we could use:

 - a keyword or tracking bug in Bugzilla.
 - phabricator , I would not mind start being used to it
 - trello (yet another tool)

We used to do weekly reviews of bugs keyworded platformeng.  The are 111
of bugs so you would have a hard time raising attention for the micro
tasks though :(
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=platformeng


--
Antoine "hashar" Musso

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--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager for Platform
Wikimedia Foundation