2011/3/2 Mark A. Hershberger omhershberger@wikimedia.org:
To help with code review, Roan introduced “sign-offs” for developers who are not as familiar with the MediaWiki code base. I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I would like to encourage any developer who isn't ready to mark code “OK” to use the sign-off feature — to indicate that they've tested or inspected the code.
That's exactly what I had in mind when writing it, yes. Regardless of your level of experience, you can mark commits as 'tested' if you've confirmed it does what it claims to do. If you have some MediaWiki experience but don't quite consider yourself a code reviewer or an expert in the specific area a commit touches, you can read the diff of a commit and mark it as 'inspected' to signify you've read the diff and it looks fine to you.
If you test something and it's broken, or you read something and see something bad, add a comment to the revision and set its status to fixme. Before you do this, though, check the list of follow-up revisions to see if the issue you're about to report has been fixed already.
The sign-off system is designed specifically so that you absolutely don't have to worry about being wrong or not having enough experience. All a sign-off will do is add an entry saying "user X says this looks good", and multiple users can sign off on a commit as tested, inspected, or both, independently of each other. Sign-offs don't change the status (new/fixme/ok/...) of a revision in any way, but they will help the reviewer who ends up doing the final review by telling them how many eyes have looked at a particular piece of code.
You need to be in the coder group on mediawiki.org to perform (almost?) all of these actions. If you don't have coder rights, don't worry: they're given out very liberally. Any coder can promote other users to coders, and the bar is generally not much higher than showing good faith. Having commit access usually helps, but I don't believe it's required.
So the bottom line is, anyone can help, and everyone is encouraged to do so.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
P.S.: For the old hats, this is probably mostly stuff they already know, but I figured this post could serve well as a general introduction about how to get involved in code review as a relatively inexperienced developer or end user, so I decided to take it that way.