[Foundation-l] Does anyone else think bugzilla is a complete failure

[Ilya Haykinson]

Ultimately this is an issue of answering the following question: Does the
Wikimedia Foundation have a responsibility to help projects it hosts with
development resources?

It appears that to some degree, the answer is yes: the foundation pays for
hosting and proper maintenance of servers to ensure uptime, and pays for
some development to move the platform forward.  However, so far the stance
has been that the projects are on their own when it comes to developing or
enabling additional features.

My recommendation would be that the foundation retains a technical assistant
(perhaps on a part-time basis); someone whose entire paid responsibility is
to be the arbiter of feature implementation.  Sometimes this person's job
might be to enable an extension, and make sure it doesn't break things when
it goes live; other times it might be trying to help implement a particular
minor change.   From trying to get some things deployed for Wikinews, I know
just how much of a pain it was to get a minor feature pushed through --
ultimately requiring months of back-and-forth for one page worth of code.
However, when we did get some of the technican Wikimedians' help (thank you
Brion!) we got our problems resolved within seconds.

I really believe that since Brion's job is likely to be defined in terms of
Wikimedia as a whole, it is cruicial to have someone else own the domain of
the little , individual problems on the technical front.  This way the small
projects won't have to wait months for the smallest changes.  I suspect that
having someone in that kind of a dedicated role will cut down a lot of
project frustration.

Alternatively, the foundation should make an explicit decision as to where
they want to deliniate the responsibility between the Foundation's technical
resources and the resources each project, chapter, or language is supposed
to provide to accomplish its goals.  This way each project will know what
they need to do themselves and what they should be expecting from WMF-based
resources.

-ilya haykinson
 en.wikinews

On 9/23/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/23/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > --- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On 23/09/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > people are becoming frustrated with this.  It
> > > seems a
> > > > great deal of very minor issues are handled for
> > > en.WP
> > > > very quickly. They have recently gotten help to
> > > > rearrange the side bar display of all things.  Yet
> > > > everyone says the developers are overworked.  So I
> > > > would think somehow this system of prioritizing
> > > what
> > > > gets done (bugzilla) must be broken.
> > > > Now this is my personal opinion.   I care ten
> > > times
> > > > more that the development needs of my community
> > > are
> > > > more fairly  addressed, than that the community's
> > > > voices in the Board Elections are not drowned out
> > > by
> > > > en.WP.
> > >
> > >
> > > It's an Americocentric conspiracy to take over
> > > Wikimedia, and
> > > absolutely the most effective thing for you to do is
> > > Assume Bad Faith!
> > > DOWN WITH EN:WP!!
> > >
> > >
> > > No, actually it's probably because a lot of the devs
> > > start as editors
> > > on en:wp and so that tends to be the project they
> > > hang around on and
> > > hear the bugs of most. e.g. Rob Church, who has done
> > > a *remarkable*
> > > amount of recent work on MediaWiki and can be found
> > > on en:wp and on
> > > #wikipedia ... or Tim Starling, who started as a
> > > contributor, realised
> > > there was an urgent need for development and
> > > sysadmin and pretty much
> > > moved to that.
> > >
> > > That is: if your project doesn't get its favourite
> > > bugs fixed, it's
> > > not favouritism to en:wp - it's your project not
> > > contributing to the
> > > development. These are volunteers, if you recall.
> > >
> > >
> > > - d.
> >
> > Yes I do realize a big part of issue is that the
> > people  interested in development are inherently not
> > interested in Wikisource.  I was just trying to
> > compare this issue with everyone talking about en.WP
> > dominating election issues and voting (which everyone
> > seemed to classify as a "bad thing")  But seriously to
> > everyone who thinks I am just being unrealistic here,
> > is nine months to short a time to start complaining?
> > Seriously what should my expectations be?
> >
> >
> > Birgitte SB
> >
> > __________________________________________________
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>
> I think your expectations should be that:
>
> A. Some methods of promoting enhancements to the code are more
> effective than others, and that your series of emails here has
> hopefully pointed you to some more effective methods.
>
> B. As with many open source projects, there are probably many
> enhancements that would be good, or at worst harmless, that do not
> happen because nobody who actually does coding ends up highly
> interested in the problem.
>
> The ultimate solution to B is to successfully accomplish A.  If you
> don't seem to get leverage there, then you may want to learn PHP and
> the MediaWiki codebase...  A lot of enhancements ultimately happen
> because one person wants it badly enough to code it, even if the
> existing community didn't.
>
> MediWiki is no different from any generic open source project in these
> regards.
>
> The very best, very large development base projects can have a more
> user-requirements-request driven approach, but that only works if you
> have enough coders / developers that they have "spare time" beyond the
> tasks they see as personal individual must-have or individual interest
> drivers.  I'm not sure how many people are working on MediaWiki right
> now, but it seems relatively small for a very large userbase project.
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert at gmail.com
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