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