We've been throwing away contributors.
I appreciate everyone who has responded to patches and questions in
Bugzilla.[0] But sometimes someone offers us a patch and we don't
respond for months or years, and the contributor gets the impression
that we don't care, and leaves. We should prevent that.
In the last week, I've clarified keywords for 100+ MediaWiki bugs that
have patches attached. If a patch still needs review, the bug now has
the "patch" AND the "need-review" keywords. (We were using the
latter
inconsistently.) If a patch has been reviewed, either with approval
(someone's committed it to SVN) or with criticism that requires a
response & rewrite, the bug has the "patch" and "reviewed"
keywords.
So we have about 216 patches against MediaWiki, and at least 44 against
WMF-deployed extensions, awaiting review. Ugly BZ queries[1][2] are
linked at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_guide#See_also .
If you respond to a patch, please thank the author for his or her patch,
even if it is obsolete or sucks. A patch is a gift.
The developer you encourage today might review your code in six months
and, in a year, seem indispensable. I've responded to some folks whose
patches were really obsolete and asked them to revise. Sometimes they
say yes. Sometimes they say, "Mediawiki took so long to review my
patches that I ended up making a private fork of the code... and I'm not
sure when/if I'll try to re-sync." Let's not lose these people.
[0] Special thanks to Santhosh, hexmode, Antoine, John du Hart,
Platonides, bawolff, Chad, Timo, and Bryan Tong Minh for their recent
help and responsiveness. If I left you out, I'm sorry!
[1] for MediaWiki:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_s…
[2] for WMF-deployed extensions:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_s…
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Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation