Hi Mike, I think you may be hallucinating. We are just now hiring our second code-reviewer, who is also thinking about ways to make the code review process more transparent. Danese On 8/12/10 4:49 PM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:

2010/8/13 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com>om>: I second this. The only way to become good at reviewing MediaWiki code is to write MediaWiki code for at least a year. I had been a dev for 3 years by the time I felt comfortable reviewing code, but then I hadn't been doing it full time. Someone working full time and being coached by experienced reviewers should be able to get up to speed in less than a year, IMO. This would still be quite a long time, though, so hiring people specifically for code review should be understood in that context. However, the fact that it takes so long to get a good grip on reviewing code suggests that reviewing code is just something that senior developers do, and that newly hired developers will be able to review code a few years from now. If we have our existing senior developers do more code review, educate all of our developers about code review better, and just hire more developers to initially cover the void of senior devs doing less coding and more review and later to join the reviewers, I believe we'll have a much more sustainable and sane setup than we would get by hiring people specifically for review and having them focus on review from day 1. I would also like to hear specific suggestions here. I think there are things that could be done to improve our code review process in terms of making sure code gets reviewed in a timely fashion and by the right person. (I have some ideas about that just occurred to me today, so I'll take the time to think about them and hash them out more while I'm on vacation, and maybe post them next week.) However, it's not clear to me how transparency could be improved. All the data is already made available, all that could be improved AFAICT is making it easier to obtain. Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

Danese Cooper wrote: The area of contractors and Wikimedia hires has to be one of the most opaque parts of Wikimedia. Unless someone is fully certified as a member of the staff and is listed at wmf:Staff,[1] there is almost no way to figure out who's working for Wikimedia, in what capacity, and for what duration. The only real recourse available to contributors is to directly ask each individual person whether or not they're staff, and sometimes they'll answer.[2] For an organization that prides itself on openness and transparency, I don't see how it's acceptable to intentionally keep the list of people Wikimedia is hiring that are doing code development work a complete secret. I've personally asked Erik to have people listed on some sort of page on the WMFwiki, but apparently the overhead for a simple ordered list is too high. Without being able to know who's working on what or when or why, it makes it so much harder for people not hired by Wikimedia (the ones who do the majority of the code development) to collaborate with the ones who have been hired (or partially hired). I can say that the majority of code development work I've been seeing lately from people working for Wikimedia is Usability-related or fundraising-related. If there are code reviewers being hired to do general code review, mind pointing me to a reliable source saying so? MZMcBride [1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=364616662#Are_you_Wikimedia_staff.3F

2010/8/13 Roan Kattouw <roan.kattouw(a)gmail.com>om>: All contracts go through HR (which currently is only one person, Daniel Phelps). MZMcBride asked me a while ago whether we'd maintain an up-to-date list of comings and goings of all contractors, which I don't think makes sense, simply because many contracts are intentionally short-term engagements without any meaningful community implications (e.g. administrative and in-office support contracts). However, we can certainly do better in keeping folks in the loop on contracts that have community implications, which includes most tech contracts and of course community dept. contracts. Whether this is through blog updates, a public log page, or by another method, is up to Daniel to figure out, and I know he's working on it, along with a very long list of other things. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate