First of all, I want to say that I wholeheartedly agree with everything tgr wrote.
Regarding Pine's question on technical debt. Technical debt is basically a fancy way of saying something is "icky". It is an inherently subjective notion, and at least for me, how important technical debt is depends a lot on how much my subjective sensibilities on what is icky matches whoever is talking about technical debt. So yes, I think everyone agrees icky stuff is bad, but sometimes different people have different ideas on what is icky and how much ickiness the icky things contain. Furthermore there is a trap one can fall into of only fixing icky stuff, even if its only slightly icky, which is bad as then you don't actually accomplish anything else. As with everything else in life, moderation is the best policy (imo). -- Brian On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 8:17 PM Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
