On 24/12/06, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

Hoi, This is indeed the usual method for people who are also developers. For others it is often a bridge too far.

I'm not in the least bit surprised.

The point is, that having a record on the bug tracker, where all the other damn patches are submitted, helps out with code review, if, god help us, an i18n patch goes nuts and wipes half the enwiki database.

Please drop the whole, "I'm not a developer, why the hell should I co-operate with you" attitude. I daren't actually copy directly out of the email because I don't know if my machine is configured well enough that what I'll paste ends up being Japanese or Wingdings, or a bunch of little squares.

Rob Church

On Mon, Dec 25, 2006 at 03:18:22PM +0100, Timwi wrote:

Rob Church wrote:

...

Please drop the whole, "I'm not a developer, why the hell should I co-operate with you" attitude.

Your assessment of the situation is highly unfair. There was no such attitude in either the original posting or in Gerard's comment (which I wholeheartedly agree with). Quite to the contrary, you (developers) should drop this "Do everything exactly as /we/ want or we will ignore your contribution and pretend it's useless to us" attitude.

Ok; I'm gonna throw an oar in the water here.

Rob may have overstated the case. But when a project gets big enough, procedures which have evolved for certain tasks really do become essential -- especially when some of the staff are volunteers.

It has nothing to do with a developer/non-developer schism; it's just practicality. Contributors are welcome to do things in other ways, but they do run the risk of their contributions not getting into the project's mainline.

This is true of almost every project that passes a certain size, not just this one.

Cheers, -- jra

Hoi, The question that I put to Rob on the mediawiki-i18n was in reaction to a large amount of new messages he posted that needed translation. My question to him was if these messages would become available on the BetaWiki as well. BetaWiki is a wiki operated by Nikerabbit where people can and do work on the translation of messages. Its saving grace is that it does not require anything from a translator but going there, find the messages that are not translated and translate them.

Translators are not interested in learning all kinds of procedures that may be normal to developers. They want to translate. The BetaWiki has functionality to take these translations and merge them with the main stream. I have asked both Brion and Nikerabbit if this functionality can be merged with the MediaWiki software. And they agreed to look into this and some work has already been done I understand.

From my perspective, the most obvious place to have this functionality would

be in the "incubator". It serves two purposes; a translation of a message gives instant gratification to the people working on demonstrating that a new project is feasible, and it brings this functionality into the WMF.

The point here as much as anything is that there are two communities both with separate requirements and with some 250 languages nominally supported in MediaWiki, it becomes increasingly difficult to support this. With the BetaWiki functionality we have bespoke functionality to ease this process. This makes everyone a winner.

Thanks, GerardM

On 12/26/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:

On 25/12/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:

...

Rob Church wrote:

...

Please drop the whole, "I'm not a developer, why the hell should I co-operate with you" attitude.

Your assessment of the situation is highly unfair. There was no such attitude in either the original posting or in Gerard's comment (which I wholeheartedly agree with). Quite to the contrary, you (developers) should drop this "Do everything exactly as /we/ want or we will ignore your contribution and pretend it's useless to us" attitude.

You missed the thread on mediawiki-i18n where Gerard expressed similar sentiments before.

I try to avoid adopting that attitude, actually - where someone posts a non-patch, or where something isn't done "100% right", I try to work with what we've been given and often upload a proper patch to demonstrate, for the next time, what we're looking for.

...

If you do not have the technical means or competency to copy & paste a little piece of text from a posting and submit it to MediaZilla (or indeed SVN) yourself, then let someone else do it.

As I explained in the email, I didn't do it because I wasn't sure that I had things set up right so that all sorts of hell wouldn't happen to the text in the interim.

...

already done it. But stop discouraging non-developers, *ESPECIALLY* translators, from contributing.

I'm not trying to discourage anyone from contributing. I am trying to encourage people, where possible, to place things in the "usual location", since it means their contribution is *less likely* to go "ignored".

Rob Church _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

On Wed, Dec 27, 2006 at 01:11:09PM +0100, Timwi wrote:

I know all that. But if the "usual location" is too complex to use, it is discouraging to know that the only (accepted) way to contribute is to learn a lot of stuff you're not really interested in (such as, for example, how to use BugZilla -- in all honesty, its UI is crap -- or even something like diff, a command-line tool with no UI at all).

BZ's UI is crap.

RedHat's version is much less so.

How come those patches never made it back into the mainline?

Cheers, -- jra

On 27/12/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:

Apparently Bugzilla 3 is supposed to have a better interface. I haven't looked at it, though.

Yeah, and Perl 6 is going to solve the world's scripting problems, so we have more time for the delights of Duke Nukem Forever!!1!

I don't know much about the Red Hat patches. Can we steal them from somewhere?

Rob Church