Second, returning to the subject of technical debt, my understanding was that WMF staff were concerned for years about the accumulation of technical debt, but in this thread I get the impression that WMF staff has changed their minds. Am I misunderstanding something?
Last year has seen a lot of focus on Technical Debt. WMF also has a core platform team now, which finally allows a more sustainable chipping away at some of the technical debt. Lastly our CI tools now help to gradually clean up technical debt as well. All this has showed that fixing technical debt works and can be done (even for MediaWiki). So this is why you observe a bit more relaxed attitude to this. There are still loads of problems and things that need fixing, but there is light on the horizon so people are less panicky about it.
DJ
On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 9:17 PM Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
First, I'll respond to Scott's comment that " A secondary issue is that too much wiki dev is done by WMF/WMFDE employees (IMO); I don't think the current percentages lead to an overall healthy open source community. But (again in my view) the first step to nurturing and growing our non-employee contributors is to make sure their patches are timely reviewed."
I'll make a distinction between two types of proposals:
a, Offload development work from WMF onto volunteers, and b, Grow and support the population of developers..
The first type of proposal is likely to get a cold reception from me, but I'm more supportive of the second. I don't know how many non-Wikimedia organizations which use MediaWiki software have staff that contribute in significant ways to WMF in the forms of software, time, or money, but growing the significance of those contributions sounds like a good idea. I also like programs such as GSoC and Outreachy, and for WMF providing support for volunteer devs who create tools, bots, etc. on their own initiative.
Second, returning to the subject of technical debt, my understanding was that WMF staff were concerned for years about the accumulation of technical debt, but in this thread I get the impression that WMF staff has changed their minds. Am I misunderstanding something? If the consensus opinion among the staff changed, how and why did that change happen?
Thanks,
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l