[Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?

[Domas Mituzas]

Hello!

> Domas, that is an unfair characterization of my e-mails, which I do  
> not
> believe you have read in full.

Oh, I did read your emails :-) I think they are unfair  
characterization of our development work, which you definitely do not  
understand in full.

> But had you read my e-mails you would also know that I do not advocate
> enabling the extensions unmodified, but giving them proper  
> consideration and
> refactoring the minimalist set of features that would be useful into
> something that is scalable.

That was happening, that will happen in future, that is happening now,  
at one pace or another, depending on various other issues.

> That is, I want to discuss the how the process of adding new  
> features to
> MediaWiki is broken, and how this has been a specific example.


You seem to be living in the idea of process, we are a bit on other  
side here, more concentrated on productivity.
Indeed, in development team if at least one person agrees with you,  
you usually have green light - we manage to trust people, and we do  
not want to build stupid obstacles to stop the progress of the project  
and the platform.

Only very very bored people can be looking for formal processes to  
define formal specifications to find formal consensus.

> This community, which takes quite a bit of effort to communicate with,
> effort which I have not seen from the development team:
> [ Jimmy quote included ]

You know, once upon a time, "full community consultation" was writing  
an email to wikipedia-l (thats where everyone subscribed :), and the  
three other guys would usually immediately agree with your  
modification and say "Jimbo, that is a great idea!" :)  The general  
traffic is different, community is way bigger, developers are still  
same bunch of people, who have to accommodate everyone.

Now it is a bit more complicated, with lots of different communities  
out there, the communities themselves partitioned in multiple  
subcommunities, people having way different interests, and different  
time investment.

By telling you haven't seen any effort you are either blindly  
insulting people who are doing the work, or just prove the point, that  
whatever communication you're doing, you won't reach everyone (and  
certain people will come back later bitching - therefore, ultimate  
consensus is unachievable).

By starting this discussion in foundation-l, rather than wikitech-l  
(where don't seem to be participating in too many discussions),  
indicates you didn't try too much of communications effort yourself  
(though, heh, finally I managed to match your face to the name ;-)

Cheers,
-- 
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]