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Eugene Zelenko wrote:
There are many signs of miscommunications between technical side of WMF operations and outside worlds (users, administrators, external projects): periodical rattling on Planet Wikimedia, frustrations on TranslateWiki, almost impermanently growing number of bug reports in Bugzilla.
Typical example may include:
- There is approved project X which still not created for Y days
For a long time, some site admin things like new project setups and configuration tweaks just weren't on the official agenda; every once in a while someone would go through a clear a few things out... but not necessarily all of it, and not necessarily on any kind of schedule.
As we're expanding the core staff and are better able to organize things beyond just staying online, we'll get better at these "boring" but important sorts of things that need to be properly maintained to make the site not just running, but *awesome*.
New wiki setups and config tweaks are now part of Rob's regular sysadmin maintenance assignments; we've gotten through a bunch in the last month, and should be able to keep the queue a lot shorter from now on with a regular schedule.
- Why new translations are not propagated to project X
Translations are propagated to all our sites along with all other software updates.
- Bug reports with opened years ago with several duplications
Obviously we'd like to fix those up. ;)
Definitely technical stuff members are limited resource. And even trivial fixes or problems may took much more time then expected. Code changes reviewing require efforts. But outside world don't know what is going on and could only make uneducated guesses and in best case scenario perceive technical stuff as black box
I think will be good idea to introduce some kind of technical stuff reporting and future planning (may be located on WMF site). It'll provide approximate answer for question 1; explain clearly situation with 2 (like "rXYZ introduced database scheme changes, currently updating WMF servers"). This will also highlight and communicate priorities to general public.
This is pretty much what I try to do (not always as successfully as I plan ;) on my blog:
of which wiki-related posts are replicated on the Planet Wikimedia aggregator:
http://en.planet.wikimedia.org/
Also development road map for next quarter/year may be considered.
Indeed, we should have some more solidly visible plans going forward, with a number of explicitly planned projects going on...
Possible solution for problem 3:
- WMF may consider to allocate some part of development budget to
outside developers. It may be in form of bug fixing bounties, gifts or sponsoring travel/accommodation for participation in Wikimania/MediaWiki developers conference.
We do have an outside contracting budget, which for this year has gone to taking on a number of our volunteer developers to hack away on some bigger ongoing projects.
For instance, Erik Zachte's statistics work and Aaron Schulz's work on Flagged Revisions are being funded out of this; I'm sponsoring Andrew Garrett to tidy up some of the Configure and AbuseFilter work for making some on-wiki admin work flow a lot easier to deal with, and we'll be seeing some fun mobile development coming up soon...
There's also a "volunteer development" budget for little bits here and there but this is a less fully developed idea so far. :)
I definitely will be trying to organize some hackfest events, some of which we should be able to get some support funding for, and we'll see what other sorts of internship-style things we can arrange...
- Advertisement of "Google Summer of Code" jobs on WMF projects.
We may or may not do Google Summer of Code itself next year, since we've had a lot of trouble getting enough motivated mentors to really support the student projects.
We'll see how it's looking in a few months... :)
- -- brion