Domas Mituzas wrote:
Hi!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the developer who made the switch is not an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation. Take it to wikitech- l or wikien-l, please.
Well, there is quite a bit of foundation issue here, and I'd like to explaim some general projects bits (that are neither technology, nor single-project related):
See, Jens is not employee, though has been the developer with most community-facing attitude. He has been implementing, at his own will, most of community requests. He is a volunteer, and has been dedicated to our ideals more and longer than most of us. When members of communities decide to attack with "This developer has exhibited extremely poor judgment and a gross disregard for the WIkipedia community" and nobody takes that back or apologizes, it is no fun to continue doing all these small things.
200% agree.
Foundation doesn't really facilitate this process at the moment - it is all left to individual care - both filtering, evaluating if change X would successfully follow all few hundreds policy pages, and implementation, what often requires extensive code review and familiarity of our operating environment. Do note, that community representatives come not only with these changes - various 'oh noes, remove this from site' requests are quite common, and every of them are questionable.
If people will be going to raise such huge flames and attack implementors for actually doing the job, we will really ask foundation to facilitate not only all the evaluation of every request that comes in from communities, but to provide with implementor resources too.
And we would do well to refuse doing such thing. Foundation would become a huge bottleneck and community will then begin complaining that we are hindering the development of the projects.
We have far more fun things (our jobs, lives, even wikipedia technology development) to do than go into endless debates with people who favor endless debates, sorry.
Could not agree more.
Ant