Anthere said:

• When a soft improvement is done to fit legal

requirements, please, could it be discussed on foundation-l to check if that complies with the legal requirements ?

I'm wondering if you're still obliquely talking about the contributors list. I'd love to hear that you read and understood my response to your questions.

I agree that it's a good idea for there to be more communication between the Wikimedia community and the volunteer developers. I think there are a lot of areas that could be improved -- streamlining the way bug reports and feature requests work is one of them. Having a community leader like yourself take the initiative to make this work well would be a great help to everyone.

I'd also like to say that I feel comfortable right now adding features or fixing bugs in MediaWiki that may or may not be useful for Wikimedia projects. There's an awful lot of code in MediaWiki that's not enabled for Wikipedia.

I've tried to make a point of:

1) Noting these changes on tech lists and marking them as non-Wikimedia ones. 2) Making them disabled by default.

If you think there's a problem with having features in MediaWiki that are disabled for Wikimedia projects, that's a development direction issue that should probably be discussed. I'd be somewhat unhappy doing a private fork of MediaWiki, since I'd like to give back any improvements to the code as a thank you to the Wikimedia community. But of course I'd be happy to make the effort if that was what the community wanted.

~ESP