[Foundation-l] Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases

[Chad]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 2:49 AM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote:
> ...if for example I was qualified to review a
> staff member's patch (which I'm not), I might want to think twice about
> what audience gets that feedback.
>
> --Michael Snow
>

Why? If they're contributing a patch to MediaWiki, they should go
through the same public patch/feedback -> commit/feedback cycle
as everyone else. The only acceptable time to develop in private is
when we're looking at active security vulnerabilities, and even then
once a patch has been written the code is committed and the issue
becomes public knowledge.

Can we be a bit harsh sometimes? Sure. But we're equal
opportunity offenders here. Anyone who submits code--staff or
volunteer--is subject to the same treatment on Bugzilla and Code
Review. If your patch sucks, we're going to tell you about it, and
there's absolutely no reason to sugarcoat it.

If someone can't take public criticism, then quite frankly they
probably shouldn't be working on open source software.

-Chad