Danese Cooper wrote:
I think you may be hallucinating. We are just now hiring our second code-reviewer, who is also thinking about ways to make the code review process more transparent.
The area of contractors and Wikimedia hires has to be one of the most opaque parts of Wikimedia. Unless someone is fully certified as a member of the staff and is listed at wmf:Staff,[1] there is almost no way to figure out who's working for Wikimedia, in what capacity, and for what duration. The only real recourse available to contributors is to directly ask each individual person whether or not they're staff, and sometimes they'll answer.[2]
For an organization that prides itself on openness and transparency, I don't see how it's acceptable to intentionally keep the list of people Wikimedia is hiring that are doing code development work a complete secret. I've personally asked Erik to have people listed on some sort of page on the WMFwiki, but apparently the overhead for a simple ordered list is too high.
Without being able to know who's working on what or when or why, it makes it so much harder for people not hired by Wikimedia (the ones who do the majority of the code development) to collaborate with the ones who have been hired (or partially hired).
I can say that the majority of code development work I've been seeing lately from people working for Wikimedia is Usability-related or fundraising-related. If there are code reviewers being hired to do general code review, mind pointing me to a reliable source saying so?
MZMcBride
[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=364616662#Are_you_Wikimedia_staff.3F