When contributing to upstream projects (in this case
non-MediaWiki
projects), using the
mediawiki.org address also helps to make clearer
the contributions of the Wikimedia orgs as such. You ave probably found
yourselves in the situation of finding that some
redhat.com,
hp.com or
whatever.com/org dude is committing a patch in some upstream project,
and how good that feels. It can't be bad to generate this type of
impression to developers and contributors of open source projects out
there.
For my part, though I consistently use my @member.fsf.org address, I
generally include some mention in either the commit message(s) or some
communication with the community that I'm working as an employee of the
WMF. I've made inroads with communities that way, and it appears to be
sufficient.
That too, and we have now this situation with the
metrics reports. We
get many times the question of WMF contributions compared to
independents / 3rd parties and as it is now this is very difficult to
calculate.
Can I suggest asking HR for a CSV of employee names, to which you should
be able to easily add their email addresses (probably from the commit
logs)? It might take some time, but it's also relatively simple to watch
wikitech-l for new employee announcements and add them to the list.
Checking the CSV as part of your metrics script would then be pretty simple.
Like Quim, I don't intend to force policy here, I'm just trying to solve
the problems raised :)
(can we get some community insight, here, maybe?)
--
Mark Holmquist
Software Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
http://marktraceur.info