Hi, First, I'll respond to Scott's comment that " A secondary issue is that too much wiki dev is done by WMF/WMFDE employees (IMO); I don't think the current percentages lead to an overall healthy open source community. But (again in my view) the first step to nurturing and growing our non-employee contributors is to make sure their patches are timely reviewed."
I'll make a distinction between two types of proposals: a, Offload development work from WMF onto volunteers, and b, Grow and support the population of developers.. The first type of proposal is likely to get a cold reception from me, but I'm more supportive of the second. I don't know how many non-Wikimedia organizations which use MediaWiki software have staff that contribute in significant ways to WMF in the forms of software, time, or money, but growing the significance of those contributions sounds like a good idea. I also like programs such as GSoC and Outreachy, and for WMF providing support for volunteer devs who create tools, bots, etc. on their own initiative. Second, returning to the subject of technical debt, my understanding was that WMF staff were concerned for years about the accumulation of technical debt, but in this thread I get the impression that WMF staff has changed their minds. Am I misunderstanding something? If the consensus opinion among the staff changed, how and why did that change happen? Thanks, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
