[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] tech team - content community bottleneck

[David Gerard]

A note from a dev. If you rant about their evil enough, you can
successfully get them to say "fine, you do it" and leave. Then you can
feel a real sense of achievement at your good work for Wikipedia.


- d.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com>
Date: 11 Jan 2008 17:51
Subject: [Foundation-l] tech team - content community bottleneck
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


Hi!

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the developer who made the
> switch
> is not an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation. Take it to wikitech-
> l or
> wikien-l, please.


Well, there is quite a bit of foundation issue here, and I'd like to
explaim some general projects bits (that are neither technology, nor
single-project related):

See, Jens is not employee, though has been the developer with most
community-facing attitude. He has been implementing, at his own will,
most of community requests. He is a volunteer, and has been dedicated
to our ideals more and longer than most of us.
When members of communities decide to attack with "This developer has
exhibited extremely poor judgment and a gross disregard for the
WIkipedia community" and nobody takes that back or apologizes, it is
no fun to continue doing all these small things.

Foundation doesn't really facilitate this process at the moment - it
is all left to individual care - both filtering, evaluating if change
X would successfully follow all few hundreds policy pages, and
implementation, what often requires extensive code review and
familiarity of our operating environment.
Do note, that community representatives come not only with these
changes - various 'oh noes, remove this from site' requests are quite
common, and every of them are questionable.

If people will be going to raise such huge flames and attack
implementors for actually doing the job, we will really ask
foundation to facilitate not only all the evaluation of every request
that comes in from communities, but to provide with implementor
resources too.

We have far more fun things (our jobs, lives, even wikipedia
technology development) to do than go into endless debates with
people who favor endless debates, sorry.

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



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