On 11/06/2013 02:33 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
Do the three architects consider themselves assuming this role as WMF employees or as community members?
For myself -- I've been a Wikipedia & MediaWiki community contributor since long before there was a Wikimedia Foundation. I still think of WMF as the new kid on the block... ;)
That said, my employment at WMF is what pays my bills and ensures I keep the majority of my attention poking at the Wikipedia and MediaWiki ecosystem (currently concentrating on the mobile world with a slice of general maintenance, code review, and architecture planning). When I spent a year and a half working at another company, I did find I had much less time to spend on MediaWiki.
Do they consider their roles to be part of a MediaWiki centric meritocracy or a Wikimedia centric meritocracy?
MediaWiki's development is traditionally Wikipedia- and Wikimedia-centric (not necessarily Wikimedia Foundation-centric); it was created for Wikipedia and I personally got involved in it to support Wikipedia's various multilingual editions. Generalized usage of MW has always been a secondary, though important, goal, and I expect Wikipedia/Wikimedia will continue to be central in MW's development for the forseeable future, even assuming we put a lot more effort into third-party support (which I think we should!)
I also caution against use of the "meritocracy" term, as I think it's pretty loaded and has a history of enabling stagnation and ingraining of cabals and antisocial behavior in free software communities. While I certainly like to think I've earned my fancy title with years of hard work, there are strong social/popularity and random-event components in any kind of ranking like this.
What is their opinion about moving forward their current team of three?
I'm not sure the "architects" really exist as a team of three; I feel like that's a fairly arbitrary selection of longtime contributors who, currently, have "architect" in their job title.
There's similarity in subsets of what we do, and some direct overlap -- Tim and I both comment on code and code designs and do the occasional big RFC review session; Tim and Mark both comment on and help debug ops and performance issues -- but we're not the 3 Musketeers... :)
Because these three long-term contributors have earned their community reputation and are clearly smart, the chances are that many of us would agree with any common answer they would agree with themselves.
:D
-- brion