2016-12-11 12:13 GMT+02:00 Amir Ladsgroup ladsgroup@gmail.com:
On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 3:19 PM Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
For 3 reasons:
- While MW is open source, what gets deployed on the WMF servers is
the legal and moral responsability of the Foundation.
They have responsibility but it's limited.
- The WMF has an 8-person "Community Liaisons" team that is dedicated
to "inform the communities during the whole process of development of said software, and facilitate its adoption." [1] For me, that means that they should be the ones that make sure that changes that impact million of pages don't get left out, even if the developer forgets to notify anyone.
It's not correct. community liaisons can't check every patch to see if it's going to impact users (and most patches have effect on users, even indirect). They built a protocol and told developers to inform them when they think the change is going to impact users *significantly*.
Then perhaps we need to define "significantly" to include changes that affect every single article on every single wiki we have. If that's not significant, I don't know what is. People claimed in this thread that your change was "almost invisible". But if just 1:1,000,000 pageviews causes someone to notice the change, in just a month, your change will have affected over 15,000 people. That's singnificant, IMHO.
Where is this protocol you talk about laid out?
- The average wikipedian does not seem to make the difference between
volunteer developers and employees of the WMF (this is a personal opinion and I might be wrong).
It's horrifyingly wrong. Lots of stuff is being done by either volunteers or staff in their volunteer capacity. You need to correct this view. not to blame WMF, right?
Wrong. It's just not realistic to expect 70.000+ editors distributed in hundreds or thousands of wikis to understand free software development, deployments and versioning. For them, it's "the developers" who "break the site" and that's all they want (and need) to know. The details need to be abstracted by someone, and the WMF is the best positioned entity to do that. I think this is already addressed, though, since that's the role of the community liaisons. It's just a question of how much can those people do - I ask more from them, others want less.
Since we got to this point, I would also like to address Tyler's email from yesterday, because it shows a similar lack of understanding of how non-technical communities use MW. He talks about red-tape slowing-down development, but forgets (or does not realise) that constant tweaking to the website is in itself red-tape for smaller communities, as it takes away valuable resources from other tasks: most Wikipedias simply do not have a web developer with admin rights. Also, throwing the responsability of maintaining Common.css up to date solely on the communities without providing a minimum of heads-up and guidance ("I don't even think this change needs to be announced") might look like a smart thing to do, but in the long run it turns pitilessly against the developers, as it results in even more technical debt that they need to address when developing new features. I think the team working on global gadgets might have some interesting stories on this process :)
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