On Mar 25, 2015 1:18 PM, "Gilles Dubuc" gilles@wikimedia.org wrote:
Does this mean there will no longer be a multimedia team/nobody
responsible
or working on what the multimedia team was working on previously?
We'll keep supporting the extensions that multimedia used to cover, in terms of addressing emergencies. This will probably be done by *the people formerly known as multimedia*, because for now there isn't any better pick than people who've worked with those extensions as first responders on breaking issues. That might change when a reactor team is formed and staffed later down the line.
As far as active development goes, some things are still in the pipeline, like addressing technical issues that affect UploadWizard's funnel. This
is
assigned to the API team but isn't the top priority for the coming quarter (I think it's 3rd in the list, but someone might know better).
More ambitious projects like structured data on commons will need a dedicated team. Resourcing for such projects will depend on organization-wide priorities.
My humble opinion is that it's a good thing to have less catch-all teams like "core" and "multimedia" and rather have teams focused on narrower, well-understood scopes. Multimedia was a vague term and it made us spread ourselves thin across many unrelated extensions and projects. It also gave the illusion that we were going to take care of everything, but we were really too small to undertake ambitious things like bringing video support into the modern era or making commons data structured. As much as it must feel disappointing that these projects are on the backburner, they already were, because of how small the multimedia team was. Maintaining the illusion wasn't a good thing, I think.
I'm a little sad to hear that, but I agree 100% with what you are saying. As the saying goes, its better to do a couple things well then to do too many things but poorly.
--bawolff