Hi,

Maybe a dumb question – I get a profound impression that this email and the guidelines are directed at Wikimedia employees, not MediaWiki extension developers in general.
...why? I thought that most extensions out there are not managed by Wikimedia, right?

It's just that as someone who wrote several extensions I'm quite puzzled by most of the non-technical guidelines there.

So, please clarify if these are guidelines for "Wikimedia extensions" or "MediaWiki extensions". In the latter case – are Wikimedia employees the right group to be guiding the discussion around these guidelines?

Ostrzyciel

TLDR: Tech leads please review Best practices for extensions on mediawiki.org.

Hi all,

You may be familiar with the Best practices for extensions page on mediawiki.org. It has been marked as a draft since 2017.

I'd like to polish this page and get it to a state where it would be uncontroversial to label it as "Development guideline". This would not make it a hard policy. Neither does it imply that it covers all practices in all situations.

Rather, it would mean that the items that are there now are indeed a part of our current best practices. We would keep it alive through bold edits and talk page conversations, similar to our Coding conventions and other such guidelines that we maintain peer to peer and through consensus.

The reason I've not simply labelled it as such already is because before today I found the document to be out of sync with our actual practices. I have made a number of changes with descriptive edit summaries to bring it in sync with what I percieve to be our best practices; based on how myself and other maintainers perform code review at large, and how we review new extensions prior to deployment.

All are welcome to fix mistakes, raise questions/concerns on the talk page, on this thread. You're also welcome to message me directly anytime if you prefer.

If you consider yourself familiar with our practices and/or lead and mentor other engineers, please take a minute to review the page and consider whether the items reflect your current understanding and judgement.

--

Timo Tijhof,

Principal Engineer,

Wikimedia Performance Team.

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