On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:43 PM, Ricordisamoa
<ricordisamoa@openmailbox.org> wrote:

Hi.
I recently started following mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase on Gerrit, and
quite astonishingly found that nearly all of the 100 most recently updated
changes appear to be owned by WMDE employees (exceptions being one change by
Legoktm and some from L10n-bot). This is not the case, for example, with
mediawiki/core.
While this may be desired by the Wikidata team for corporate reasons, I feel
that encouraging code review by volunteers would empower both Wikidata and
third-party communities with new ways of contributing to the project and
raise awareness of the development team's goals in the long term.

How would you like to see us encourage this more? It is nothing we
actively do not want of course.

The messy naming conventions play a role too, i.e. Extension:Wikibase is
supposed to host technical documentation but instead redirects to the
Wikibase portal, with actual documentation split into Extension:Wikibase
Repository and Extension:Wikibase Client, apparently ignoring the fact that
the code is actually developed in a single repository (correct me if I'm
wrong). Just to add some more confusion, there's also Extension:Wikidata
build with no documentation.

There are different repositories. They just get merged into one for deployment.

And what about wmde on GitHub with countless creatively-named repos? They
make life even harder for potential contributors.

Agreed. Something we want to tackle.

Finally, the ever-changing client-side APIs make gadgets development a pain
in the ass.

Agreed but as I said this is going to be painful for a little longer
until we have done the UI redesign. After that I want it to be more
stable again obviously.

Cheers
Lydia