For what is worth, nobody at the WMF is suggesting any kind of Architecture
Committee discrimination or promotion based on affiliation. Can we please
discuss the idea of nominating architects per area? Is there any good
reason not to do it?
Yesterday I had a chance to speak with Tim, trying to get a specific action
for the Engineering Community team in the middle of this dense and complex
topic. So here is a simple one:
Create a high level overview of the MediaWiki architecture
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T1287
Your feedback and help is welcome. There are two possible ways of
approaching this:
1. experts defining a list of core areas and key extensions
2. non-experts doing the same and upsetting the experts, who step in
If 1 doesn't work, I'll advocate for 2, with a risk of starting with the
list myself. :) Please don't let me.
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 7:31 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
I am not qualified for the ArchCom, but I am
familiar with several
engineers working in government or running private wiki farms or their
own businesses who I think would be qualified.
Another qualification I'd look for is substantial Wikimedia community
involvement. Architecting requires a very thorough understanding of who
you're building for. (I recently raised this same issue on the design
mailing list related to editing Wikipedia... I think it's very difficult
to build great tools for a community that you're not a part of.)
Thankfully, we have lots of good candidates who are both brilliant and
understand Wikimedia (Domas, Magnus, and Platonides come to mind off-hand).
The trickier part of having non-employees on a committee like this is that
other people won't be getting paid to participate and may not have as much
time to commit as a result. It's still a bit unclear to me how much work
is involved on a weekly basis. If it's just an hour-long IRC session,
that's a lot different than needing ten hours or more every week.
MZMcBride
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Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil