I probably have the best understanding of the thumbnailing system among volunteers at the moment, but I'm not interested in bailing out the WMF on this one.
The fundamental purpose of the WMF is to support the continued operation of the wikis by maintaining technical infrastructure. There is not a single Wikimedia wiki that does not use Thumbor. Nevertheless, maintenance was largely left to a single maintainer working on Thumbor as a side project, in addition to their normal responsibilities. That was a decision made or supported by WMF management. When that single maintainer left the Foundation, there was no one else to maintain the system.
Sure, I or other volunteers could get appropriate access and finish off the Thumbor python3 and Debian migrations. But that just kicks the can down the road instead of actually solving the problem. Maintenance of a critical system would still be dependent on one person (or more optimistically, a few people) working in their spare time with no plan for continuity. That just puts us back to the position we were in a year ago, which we now know is not sustainable.
Critical infrastructure not directly supported by a WMF team, with a plan for continued maintenance if a core maintainer leaves, has been a well-documented risk since before the WMF was created. Yet this is not the first example of WMF management deferring maintenance from production systems. In the case of Wikimedia Maps, a full production outage was necessary before WMF management decided Maps was worth maintaining. DPL echos a similar tale. What else has to fail before WMF management starts taking this seriously?
ACN
On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 8:31 AM Inductiveload inductiveload@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 11 Jan 2022 at 12:17, Chico Venancio chicocvenancio@gmail.com wrote:
I do not think our goal is to get it done **by paid WMF staff**, but it is also true that today that is the only viable alternative to get major technical work done. I do not think it is entirely fair to state that "status quo can be changed by just about anyone who is motivated to do so (...) just by doing the work". It is not a lack of motivation that hinders our movement technically, but a lack of resources and shared governance.
As someone who has tried to contribute using some of my "Covid time", and who will shortly be going back to real work, it's also deeply frustrating if you cannot meaningfully contribute incrementally, but run into a lack of interest in engaging with issues. If someone has come along with even a half-decent bug report, it's possible that that represents about an hour or so of work: detecting the bug, isolating it, creating a Phab account, writing the report all take time. An hour of time is actually a lot for someone who commutes to a 9 to 5, let alone someone with family.
Now, if that person wants to _fix_ the bug, it took me, very roughly[1], three working days to get to a position where I could even run Mediawiki locally with the right extensions in Docker[2], figure out the code, find out enough about PHP to make a change, actually make the changes, and propose a patch for a simple issue, and respond to the inevitable CI issues because you can't get the tests to work locally. If I had been doing that in the time between getting home from the office and making dinner, that's a month of work, and would replace all my other interests into the bargain. It's _also_ frustrating when you then get the patch -1'd because you tried to follow existing code, but that's actually old and busted and you should use the new hotness that everyone inside the engineering team might know, but is highly non-obvious to a person who only cloned the repo on Monday. Every review response or rebase also takes a good chunk of time, especially if the patch has "gone cold". And then there's a good chance your it just rots on Gerrit anyway until you have moved on with your life.
I think (making stuff up alert) a reason people want the WMF to help here is not just because they collect more than the GDP of Nauru[3] per year on the implication that they it supports the wikis, but also because they actually employ people specifically because they _do_ know how to do this stuff effectively, and what is a month of sacrificed hobbies for one poor sap is half an hour for them. That's a hell of a force multiplier if there was just slack in the engineering to allow it. Teach a man to fish and tomorrow he might help you repair your jetty. Expect a man to figure out how to mine iron for fish hooks on his own and reverse engineer a fishing rod, and he'll be hungry for a good while and your jetty is going to stay broken if he wanders off in search of something other than fish to eat.
Now, sure, you can say "well it's not the WMF's fault that you have a job/family/commute/other hobbies/a herd of depressed pet llamas in constant need of hugs, is it?" and yes, you are right, they don't officially _owe_ anyone anything. However, it's also a shame to completely write off the ability of llama-owners to contribute, unless they're willing to put in more time or effort than very many people have to spare. Honestly, if I hadn't had Covid time, I would have given up on any patch after the first several hours and just walked away[4]. And that would have been a shame for me (I'll let others decide if it would be a shame for the software!)
So I guess the tl;dr here is that actually a relatively small amount of care[5] from the WMF can multiply the effectiveness of outside contributions greatly. Those contributions, in turn, can magnify the ability of the Communities themselves to Get Content Done[6]. And that's the aim here, is it not? We're all on the same side!
--IL
[1] I mean, what did time even mean in 2021, anyway?! [2] Since then, Docker has gotten better, though I still can't get Phan to work with any regularity, and it doesn't really feel like any "staff" developers actually use the method described in CONTRIBUTING.md to run up MediaWiki very often. [3] Yes, really. To be fairrrr, it's a very small island. [4] In fact, before Covid, I tried to do some patches and did exactly that, more than once. [5] Developer Advocacy is a team that exists, but at least in my personal experience, I have never actually encountered it, except for bug wrangling. [6] Perfect example: ProofreadPage is pretty much entirely non-core tech and yet has facilitated almost all work on Wikisource for a decade. I'm not sure such a system could be written and deployed today. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/