Hi Jeroen,
I don't know whether you realize how confrontational your email sounds, and
how difficult it is to start a friendly and constructive conversation with
such beginning. Since this is an open, welcoming, and friendly mailing
list, I ask you please to consider this important factor in future
communications.
The MediaWiki codebase powers one of the top Internet websites and
thousands more, with a wide variety of use cases. It also supports APIs,
extensions, gadgets, templates and more, allowing for the development of
very different features and usages. Nobody denies that the MediaWiki
codebase needs attention and focused work, in fact this is why this team is
being created, but there must be something good in it that made it arrive
to this point.
It is difficult to agree or disagree with your blunt and very vague
critique. Still, at the end you ask a good question: what will be different
this time?
Reading
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Platform_team there is one
sentence that shows what in my humble opinion is a key difference:
Our approach recognizes that MediaWiki is a product in
its own right and
deserves a dedicated
roadmap, product manager, and engineering team with a
sense of product
ownership.
The initial team has four developers that know the MediaWiki codebase very
well, and a dedicated product manager is being hired
<https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/613548?gh_src=1u385n1#.WOI0pogxAt0>.
It has been a while since these developers or anyone could work full time
maintaining MediaWiki core as a whole. The page also mentions a focus on
paying off technical debt, on working on platform dependencies of Community
Wishlist wishes, on treating feature development teams as customers... and
I don't recall any of these being an explicit goal in the past.
I think all this is great news. I am looking forward to see the new team in
action, and the first results of their work.
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil