Its one thing allowing access and supporting volunteers, its another to be abrogating it's responsibility to ensure the stable running of the projecst for which its collecting millions of dollars in donations every year.

WMF key purpose is to provide the infrastructure need for every project to operate, at the moment there is no apparent effort from the WMF to do that for Wikimedia Commons despites it being the vital source for every projects multimedia. This isnt one off missed opportunity, its failed in that responsibility for year after year and now we as contributors are baring the fruits of that neglect.

On Tue, 11 Jan 2022 at 14:01, Kunal Mehta <legoktm@debian.org> wrote:

Hi,

On 1/1/22 12:10, Asaf Bartov wrote:
> It seems to me there are *very few* people who could change status quo,
> not much more than a handful: the Foundation's executive leadership (in
> its annual planning work, coming up this first quarter of 2022), and the
> Board of Trustees.

If the goal is to get paid WMF staff to fix the issues, then you're
correct. However, I do not believe that as a solution is healthy
long-term. The WMF isn't perfect and I don't think it's desirable to
have a huge WMF that tries to do everything and has a monopoly on
technical prioritization.

The technical stack must be co-owned by volunteers and paid staff from
different orgs at all levels. It's significantly more straightforward
now for trusted volunteers to get NDA/deployment access than it used to
be, there are dedicated training sessions, etc.

Given that the multimedia stack is neglected and the WMF has given no
indication it intends to work on/fix the problem, we should be
recruiting people outside the WMF's paid staff who are interested in
working on this and give them the necessary access/mentorship to get it
done. Given the amount of work on e.g. T40010[1] to develop an
alternative SVG renderer, I'm sure those people exist.

Take moving Thumbor to Buster[2] for example. That requires
forward-porting some Debian packages written Python, and then testing in
WMCS that there's no horrible regressions in newer imagemagick, librsvg,
etc. I'm always happy to mentor people w/r to Debian packaging (and have
done so in the past), and there are a decent amount of people in our
community who know Python, and likely others from the Commons community
who would be willing to help with testing and dealing with whatever fallout.

So I think the status quo can be changed by just about anyone who is
motivated to do so, not by trying to convince the WMF to change its
prioritization, but just by doing the work. We should be empowering
those people rather than continuing to further entrench a WMF technical
monopoly.

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T40010
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T216815

-- Legoktm
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