Rob Lanphier has asked that the WMF architects -- namely Brion Vibber,
Mark Bergsma, Asher Feldman and myself -- take a leading role in
accepting or rejecting RFCs, or delegating that decision as appropriate.
Along these lines, I'd like to add an header template to every RFC
indicating its status as determined by one of these architects or the
people to whom they delegate authority. The header would indicate not
only status (mirroring the index page) but also the name of the person
who chose that status.
Seeking consensus has always been a key part of my work on MediaWiki.
I expect that a large part of assigning a status to an RFC will simply
be to evaluate the comments of the participants, or to seek comments
from specific domain experts where none have been given.
Many RFCs are just "good ideas", often attracting no comment because
there is no obvious criticism of the feature at the level of detail
given by the proposer. This raises the question of whether an RFC is a
feature request (like a Bugzilla enhancement) or a design document. If
an RFC is a design document, then we might ask for more detail about
feature implementation, and close the RFC if none is given. This may
lead to the closure of RFCs which have no interest or support from
developers. I'm inclined to think that this is an appropriate path to
take, i.e. that RFCs should be design documents, but I am interested
to hear comments on the subject.
Please comment here or on
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment>
-- Tim Starling