On Fri, 2003-10-31 at 00:59, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Thursday, Oct 30, 2003, at 16:36 US/Pacific, Chris
Seaton wrote:
I tried to start developing, but found myself
largely ignored. I asked
for suggestions as to where to start, what were the areas that needed
work, but was just vaguely pointed towards the bug reports.
If someone had said you can do X - something attainable within a few
hours - I would have probably been hooked.
What we need are bug fixes and performance improvements.
What we need are developers. To do that you have to get people
interested. When I asked what I could do and people sent me to the bug
reports page it was like starting dumping a pile of work on my desk. I
didn't know where to start.
Unfortunately
this isn't very sexy; you need to have some familiarity with the code
to understand how it works and track down the bits that don't work
right or don't run well, and that's work:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks
Instead, newcomers tend to want to add sexy new features that scratch
their personal itches. These can be neat, but they also introduce new
bugs and new slowdowns. We don't need new features right now. We need
ugly, unpleasant grunt work that no one wants to do.
And it won't get done unless people encourage new developers.
I made one commit to CVS, but it still hasn't
gone onto the English
Wikipedia (it was only one line).
We're *all* overworked. If something isn't getting done, you have to
either do it yourself or speak up. In this case, speak up.
My pointers:
- Be very enthusiastic when someone comes forward
- Give them something to get hooked on
- Access to a test server
A public test server that won't wipe out our live server if something
goes wrong would be great. Who wants to set that up? Lee at least did
provide access to his server for this purpose, I don't know if that's
still going on.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l --
Chris Seaton
chris(a)chrisseaton.com
http://www.chrisseaton.com/