On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 7:27 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 23/03/13 03:26, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
On 03/21/2013 09:54 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
Also, community managers generally see it as their responsibility to extract as much work from volunteers as possible
The community managers for MediaWiki (Quim and me) don't think like this. If you believe we do, please say so. :-)
Maybe I was mistaken, then. It seems like an excellent goal to me, I don't know why you're upset with the allegation.
I think many of us bristle at the word "extract" to describe the work that the ECT does. Lemonade is extracted from lemons, leaving the sad little husk of a lemon behind, and that's the image the word "extract" conjures up. It implies a finite resource to be depleted of value, discarding what remains.
A good volunteer manager will encourage mutually-beneficial activities, and build long-term relationships with contributors. If we can help volunteers achieve personal goals in addition to helping out the Wikimedia movement and/or the MediaWiki ecosystem, we will often try, because that attracts and retains volunteers, and because its The Right Thing To Do(tm).
To Niklas's original point: sometimes, it makes sense to ask volunteer developers to notify the community of changes before they make those changes. Sometimes it makes sense for us to help. There is no blanket policy we can institute.
Rob