On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 8:20 AM, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
Hey folks,
I usually steer clear of these sort of battles, but it looks like it's
time to state the obvious: *we need to work together better*.
We're wiki people, damn it. We're the people[1] who figured out how to
build an encyclopedia through (effectively) an anonymous system when those
with less imagination were skeptical what it could even work at all. Now,
we're fighting against ourselves about technology to support our wiki work
and it is only wasting time, energy and social capitol.
DaB, I don't follow toolserver-l as well as I should. What can I do to
help make sure that the Toolserver cluster is well supplied *at least* until
labs meets 99.9% of tool developers needs. Do I need to lobby the WMF?
WMDE?
Ryan, I'm sure it was not out of some sort of malicious intent, but a large
number of toolserver users and especially DaB are
getting a raw deal. At
some point, someone seems to have suggested that WMF Labs ought to replace
the Toolserver. This is painful because, while Labs is not yet ready for
us, the Toolserver is already being phased out. It's not fair to just say,
"Come on over to Labs and help us." I don't see how jumping ship before
the next one shows up is a good idea. The majority of us are doing our
work as volunteers. We can't just manifest extra maintainer hours in order
to spend developer time on Labs. We're already spending more time dealing
with Toolserver issues than we normally would.
I don't think it's necessary to lobby anyone. WMDE has agreed to continue
funding TS during the transition period, and the final decommissioning date
is 2014-12-31 (see <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Tool_Labs/Roadmap_en>).
Finally, the Toolserver isn't just a resource.
It's our community. A
community is far more valuable than technology. If we don't preserve our
community, we'll all lose. So please, when we're fighting each other, our
first thought should be how to not need to fight anymore.
That's what I'm encouraging as well. I'd like the community to move
intact
to Labs, including DaB. Fighting each other won't get us anywhere. If we
all work together to build the new environment, it'll go quicker and we'll
resolve issues together.
- Ryan