On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 10:57 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On 16/01/15 15:04, Rob Lanphier wrote:
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.
It's not a community open source project, it is an engineering
organisation with a strict hierarchy. We don't have a BDFL, we have a VPE.
Alrighty, Tim, I have a great deal of respect for you, and all of the good
things I've said about you in this thread are objective facts, not me
buttering you up. But this is an area where a lot of people are dying for
you to step up, and have been for some time.
As someone who has been your manager for several years now, I have to
openly giggle at the "strict hierarchy" characterization :-)
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?
Sorry to labour the point, but the way to go about this at present is
pretty straightforward, and it doesn't involve the architecture committee.
You just convince the management (Damon, Erik, etc.) that it is a good
thing to do, get yourself appointed head of the "MediaWiki 2.0" team, hire
a bunch of people who agree with your outlook, get existing engineers
transferred to your team. It's not even hypothetical, we've seen this
pattern in practice.
All it would take is for you to muse out loud on this list "hey, what is up
with 'MediaWiki 2.0'?" (or whatever it is), and we could have a productive
conversation about that. If the argument for its potentially misguided
nature is made with respect and kindness, it will be welcomed.
I've clearly touched a nerve here. I knew I was risking that, and I'm
sorry that I didn't find the exact way to raise the points I needed to
raise without doing so. But I'm not sorry I started this conversation.
There's a lot of folks here at the organization who have been agreeing to
disagree for waaaaay too long, and we've gotta come clean here.
For you or anyone on my team (or for that matter, anyone) who wants help
figuring out how to have a productive conversation on wikitech-l about
important issues, I'm happy to help out.
Rob