"I came across a patch from a user who was keen to move himself from "Patch contributors" to "Developers" in the MediaWiki CREDITS file [1]. It had been sitting there for over a year. He doesn't seem to have been active since. I don't know what to do with it. It made me think.
Do we have it documented anywhere how we use this credits file and why we feel the need to distinguish between Developers and Patch Contributors? It seems like a recipe for disaster in my opinion as it can only lead to hurt feelings due to contributors feeling unfairly treated. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Version/Credits leads with 'We would like to recognize the following persons for their contribution to MediaWiki." - if someone is not in that list are they not as important? If we keep these files we should probably explain the rules to what adding names looks like within these files and what the process to adding your name is (can I add myself? Is there a process like getting +2?) To take another extreme, we might consider abandoning such a file in favour of something automatically generated. Things like https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/graphs/contributors do a far better job at allowing people to see who contributed to a tool and making people feel like their work is rewarded. On a slightly related note, can we abandon the practice of putting names inside files themselves? I see this practice in JavaScript and PHP files throughout core (grep for @author). As Team Geek [2] (great read btw) says "unlike other collaborative pieces of creative work... software keeps changing even after it's "done". So while listing contributors credits at the end of a movie is a safe and static thing, attempting to add and remove names from a source file is a never-ending exercise in insanity". For similar reasons this practice gives an impression of ownership of a file/code review responsibilities (which are not always true) and risks hurt feelings. [1] https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/CREDITS [2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=9781449302443 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
