(Alright...let's try this again!)
Hi everyone,
The current MediaWiki Architecture Committee[1] has its roots in a
2013 Amsterdam Hackathon session[2], where we had a pair of sessions
to try to establish our architectural guidelines[3]. It was there
that we agreed that it would be good to revive our then moribund
process for reviewing RFCs[4]. Since no one there really knew whose
job it was to review these things, I believe I said "how about we
start with everyone with 'architect' in their title at WMF?", which
was met with uncomfortable shrugging that I interpreted as
"consensus!", and no one corrected me. Thus Brion Vibber, Mark
Bergsma, and Tim Starling became the founding members of the Arch
Committee.
Subsequent to that meeting, I pretended to proceed as though a
decision was made. However, over the past year and half since then,
there's been much more uncomfortable shrugging. Even Brion, Mark, and
Tim have not seemed entirely comfortable with the idea. It was widely
acknowledged that the group was heavily biased toward the lower parts
of our server software stack. The committee agreed to add Roan
Kattouw and Daniel Kinzler to the group as a means of providing a
wider perspective, with the added bonus of adding at least one person
who isn't a WMF employee.
So, here we are today. I believe no one would dispute the credentials
of every member of the group. Brion, Tim, and Mark have an extremely
long history with the project, being employees #1, #2, and #3 of the
WMF respectively, and all having contributed massively to the success
of Wikipedia and to MediaWiki as general purpose wiki software. In
most open source projects, one of them would probably be BFDL[5].
Roan and Daniel are more "recent", but only in relative terms, and
also have very significant contributions to their name. All have the
widespread respect of pretty much everyone in the MediaWiki developer
community.
Additionally, I hear quite a bit of relief that the previously
moribund RFC process is doing much better now. Things are moving, and
if you know how to work the process and aren't proposing anything too
wild, you can get an RFC approved pretty quickly. The committee has
made a lap through the entire backlog of RFCs.
Still, the uncomfortable shrugging continues. The group is broader,
but still lacks the breadth, particularly in front end and in the
development of newer services such as Parsoid and RESTBase. This
aspect is pretty obviously something that can be fixed. Another
problem is that the scope of the group isn't clear to everyone. Is
this group responsible for leading, or merely responsible for
reviewing big ideas from others to ensure continuity and sanity? How
big does an idea need to be before an RFC needs to be written (as
opposed to just dropping a patch in Gerrit)? Defining the scope of
the group is also a fixable problem.
However, I don't sense much of a desire to fix things. The dominant
meme that I hear is that we should go back to the day before
uncomfortable shrugging led to a committee becoming BFDL. What I
fear, though, is that we will develop a system lacking in conceptual
integrity[6], as individual warring fiefdoms emerge. It's quite
simple to argue this is already happening.
So, where does that leave us? Do we need a BFDL? If so, who should
pick? Should it be someone in the project? Should the WMF hire
someone to lead this? If not, do we keep the committee? Do we just
let this be consensus based?
On the leadership front, let me throw out a hypothetical: should we
have MediaWiki 2.0, where we start with an empty repository and build
up? If so, who makes that decision? If not, what is our alternative
vision? Who is going to define it? Is what we have good enough?
In general, I feel a sense of urgency that seems lacking in the status
quo. We've made progress over the past couple of years, but it
doesn't feel like our progress is entirely up to the task. We have a
collection of *many* instances of individual or small team excellence
that are sadly the mere sum of their parts. My intuition is that we
lose out on multiplicative effects as we fail to engage the wider
group in our activities, and as we lack engineering-level
orchestration. Team-level pride in fantastic work drifts into
project-level despair, as many excellent engineers fail to grasp how
to make big changes outside of their limited domains.
Perhaps I'm being too hyperbolic. Perhaps the answer is "embrace the
chaos; it's the Wiki Way(tm)" I don't buy it, but I'm probably one of
the easier people to convince of this. I think if this is the way
it's gonna be, someone needs to make the case how this is actually
working now. Step up.
Perhaps I'm also suffering from living inside the WMF echo chamber for
too long. It could be that the general pessimism about the direction
of MediaWiki (or lack thereof) is not shared out here. Perhaps people
who get most of their news from this mailing list are perfectly happy
with the status quo, and appreciate the balance we've struck with our
weekly meetings and a committee whose membership is not entirely
static.
To be clear here: this is not an announcement about actually
disbanding the committee. Even though I had a hand in creating it,
it'd be dumb for me to unilaterally pressure the committee to disband.
I may nudge and cajole (like I'm doing here), but I'm first and
foremost looking to figure out what the consensus is, and then follow
through on it.
Discuss.
Rob
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_committee
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings/Amsterdam_Hackathon_20…
[3]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_guidelines
[4]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment
[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
[6]
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ConceptualIntegrity