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