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(a)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 )
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