[Wikitech-l] Reflecting on my listening tour

Perhaps i am hyperfocused on technical debt in the sense of improving the abstractions used in mediawiki. The phrasing around sustainability especially leads me in that direction. However, technical debt is certainly a broad concept and can mean a lot of things. The common thread in the examples you cited seem to be things that have fallen through the ownership cracks. I'm not sure its the case that engineers aren't incentivized to fix these, so much as there are no natural engineers to be incentivized due to team structure (scribunto is an exception but i would disagree with that task's inclusion for reasons that get off topic). On the other hand, perhaps a different incentivization structure would encourage people to branch out more. I think it is especially telling that 3 (or 4 even) of these tasks are multimedia related, given that wmf hasn't had a multimedia team in a very long time [SDC does not count], and definitely not one focused on the backend. There are quite a few multimedia related areas in desperate need of love (it is 2023 and video uploads are limited to 4gb with the flakiest upload process known to man). It was also pointed out to me on irc, that many critical workflows in the community depend on toolforge tools that have very limited volunteer maintainership. A sort of https://xkcd.com/2347/ situation. Just because they're not "production" we often pretend they don't exist. Regardless of how we label them, in the end it doesn't make a difference to the end user, and the fragility of that ecosystem is a form of technical debt that is often overlooked. So i guess it all depends on what is meant by "technical debt" -- Brian On Friday, April 14, 2023, Andre Klapper <aklapper(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: