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.
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.
And what about wmde on GitHub
with countless creatively-named repos? They make life even harder
for potential contributors.
Finally, the ever-changing client-side APIs make gadgets development
a pain in the ass.
Sorry if this sounds like a slap in the face, but it had to be said.