Honestly, I find the "not in the annual plan" thing more damning than the actual issue at hand.
The core competency of WMF is supposed to be keeping the site running. WMF does a lot of things, some of them very useful, others less so, but at its core its mission is to keep the site going. Everything else should be secondary to that.
It should be obvious that running a 300 TB+ media store servicing 70 billion requests a month requires occasional investment and maintenance
And yet, this was not only not in this year's annual plan, it has been ignored in the annual plan for many many years. We didn't get to this state by just 1 year of neglect.
Which raises the question - If wmf is not in the business of keeping the Wikimedia sites going, what is it in the business of?
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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