Rob Lanphier has asked that the WMF architects -- namely Brion Vibber, Mark Bergsma, Asher Feldman and myself -- take a leading role in accepting or rejecting RFCs, or delegating that decision as appropriate.

Along these lines, I'd like to add an header template to every RFC indicating its status as determined by one of these architects or the people to whom they delegate authority. The header would indicate not only status (mirroring the index page) but also the name of the person who chose that status.

Seeking consensus has always been a key part of my work on MediaWiki. I expect that a large part of assigning a status to an RFC will simply be to evaluate the comments of the participants, or to seek comments from specific domain experts where none have been given.

Many RFCs are just "good ideas", often attracting no comment because there is no obvious criticism of the feature at the level of detail given by the proposer. This raises the question of whether an RFC is a feature request (like a Bugzilla enhancement) or a design document. If an RFC is a design document, then we might ask for more detail about feature implementation, and close the RFC if none is given. This may lead to the closure of RFCs which have no interest or support from developers. I'm inclined to think that this is an appropriate path to take, i.e. that RFCs should be design documents, but I am interested to hear comments on the subject.

Please comment here or on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment

-- Tim Starling