I have to say that I have the same expirance with the current process for requesting commit access.

I currently have access to SVN, it was given to me 2 years ago by TimStarling. But i changed my key(s) but it didn't change for Wikimedia. So I requested Sumana to close my old account and give me a new account with a better name.

This was her responds:

Hi Huib,

I apologize for the late response. After some discussion, we decided that the best way to proceed is for you to submit your proposed improvements as a patch in bugzilla.wikimedia.org, or make your extension public on mediawiki.org (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions). This gives us a much better idea of what your proposal is and makes it a lot easier to review.

Sincerely, Priyanka Dhanda

So I was already given access, but by error I lost the key and now got removed.

I don't really think the current proces is helping to get more volunteers...

Best,

Huib Laurens 2011/11/5 Neil Kandalgaonkar neilk@wikimedia.org

Olivier, I'm truly sorry you had such a negative experience. This is not an acceptable situation. We have an inconsistent process, and one which is a bit heavyweight when our resourcing for it is rather lightweight.

I wish you had found the patience to assume good faith. There is no reason for accusations that we don't want good developers. Of course we *want* them. If we are failing to act like it, it wasn't a personal slam at you.

And, if I may be forgiven for white-knighting, Sumana's job is to needle the rest of us so we don't forget about concerns like yours and she generally does it very well. And she did sound an apologetic note into the email she sent you. So IMO she's not the problem here. Why she played a game of telephone here is a bit of a mystery to me though -- maybe she just wanted to be sure that *someone* pinged you since it had been so long. IMO the developer who reviewed your code should have contacted you directly.

I had a look at the module you wrote. I share some of the same concerns about scalability, but that's not really the issue.

I have some experience with user-contributed module archives, having administered some shared community resources for Perl, Python, and so on. The cultural differences and relative successes were interesting. The Python people wanted to have a review process, and a GUI interface, and binary modules precompiled, and so on and so on, and their projects never really got off the ground. Perl's CPAN started off as a simple FTP site where almost anyone could upload code. Guess which one ultimately succeeded. The point is, IMO there's relatively little payoff for having *any* review process for modules. Just have a way to report and remove malware and be done with it. As long as it's clear that the Foundation doesn't endorse the software there, what is the problem? Maybe we can also have some kind of badge for "reviewed" or "as seen on Wikipedia" for the stuff we consider good enough to deploy on big sites.

We already more or less do this -- for instance, there are modules by GSoC students that are clearly not ready for prime time, and they are marked accordingly.

On 11/4/11 11:47 PM, MZMcBride wrote:

...

The long and short of my advice is this: fuck MediaWiki. If they're unwilling to accept your contributions, there are a lot of other FOSS projects that would be happy to have you. Thrilled to have you, even. I'd strongly encourage finding one. :-)

And why should he listen to you, when you are unwilling to follow your own advice?

-- Neil Kandalgaonkar |) neilk@wikimedia.org

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