On 21/03/13 20:55, Niklas Laxström wrote:
I've seen a couple of instances where changes to MediaWiki are blocked until someone informs the community.
Someone is a volunteer.
Community is actually just the Wikimedia project communities. Or at least the biggest ones which are expected to complain and where the complaining would hurt.
This situation seems completely unfair to me. WMF should be able to communicate upcoming changes itself, not throw it to volunteers. Volunteers can help, but they should not be responsible for this to happen.
I would assume that "do it yourself" is usually code for "we don't consider this deployment to be important enough to spend any time on it at the moment."
Fair enough, volunteers don't have an automatic right to dictate other people's priorities, a fact which might need to be communicated with tact.
Also, community managers generally see it as their responsibility to extract as much work from volunteers as possible, and will ask a volunteer to do something whether or not a WMF staff member would be more than happy to do it.
-- Tim Starling