Hi all,
I am very disappointed by current development process we have on
wikimedia project. The wikimedia project itself is classified as open
source at some point, but the current development process sort of
beats the purpose of that.
I started working on two extensions in October, more than 6 months
ago. Both were approved by community on Village Pump and it was agreed
to deploy them to english wikipedia. One of the extension had hundreds
of lines and is considered as "bigger", the other one consist of +- 15
lines of code, which was developed together with Ian Baker who is
employee of the wikimedia foundation. I was told that in order to
deploy it, I need to pass code review. I requested code review many
times on many places and although it was more than 6 months ago, no
one seemed to be able to review these 15 lines of code so far, despite
the community agreed with the idea of extension.
I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
sites. If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
suggested to do.
While this is secure for the foundation, so that it can actually have
perfect control over the code which is wikimedia running on, it is
sort of against the idea of open software.
So, it should be either described how this works, because if what I
just said is true (I hope it's not) it should be definitely somewhere
noted, to avoid getting more volunteers spending time on pointless
work, or the development process should be completely changed so that
it allows this "open source" project, to be actually open.
Thank you