| polybuildr added a comment. |
Hi, I was a GSoC student last summer, and while I haven't mentored a student for GSoC, I did do a little mentoring for the previous Google Code In. Having had a great experience working with the Wikimedia community, I introduced @darthbhyrava to it.
In sharp contrast to my wonderful experience, the state of this evaluation and the responses of the community to it cause me great pain and since I care greatly for the way we as a community treat contributors, I felt that I must leave this rather long response. Please forgive me if I inadvertently offend someone, I assure you that is not my intention.
It is true that we demand students' complete their MVP by the midterm evaluation, but I'd like you to take a moment and ask yourself why. IMHO, it is because we want to ensure that students are not negligent in their duties - whether it be working on code and responding to reviews or whether it is staying in touch with the mentors. I have seen the state of some students past Wikimedia mentors and org admins have failed - the students very clearly demonstrated a serious lack of dedication to both of these duties. Try as I might, I simply don't see a a parallel here. The student in question has submitted patches for review, modified them based on review comments and kept in touch with the mentors. I see no sign of negligence.
I would like to further point out that not everything is under a GSoC student's control. How do their patches reach mergeable state? Because community members and mentors review them and suggest changes - that's why the GSoC program has mentors in the first place, doesn't it? As @tonythomas points out, a much larger effort is required on the part of the student, and I whole heartedly agree. However, can we as a community possibly expect improvement in the patches that a student submits if there are no reviews pending for them to work on? It is simply impossible for a student to get their patches to a meargeable state if they don't have advice on how to improve them. Another argument that was made was of certain things being so obvious, there should be no reason for them to be review comments. Sure, there exist such things. But seriously, we're human beings, we make mistakes, we need advice - sometimes repeated for it to stick. Derogatory reactions to these kind of mistakes is really not what I expect from the community - and certainly not a failed mid term.
All of my above arguments were attempted counters to reasons pointed out earlier. However, and this is probably the most shocking part for me to witness - the reasons pointed above for failing don't convince me in the first place. I haven't looked into the matter thoroughly, but it seems to me that the student has actually completed the MVP, albeit not being up to the mark. The proposal says (with the mentors' approval) that a V+2 by Jenkins can also be considered sufficient, provided the patches are also integrated on a github branch with the respective tests passing. It seems like they are. Also, one must also investigate why the patches aren't submitted. Is it because the student has not written any code to be submitted? No, it's because the patches are under review. Is the student not responsive to review comments? It doesn't seem like that either. The student also mentions that pywikibot master itself had issues with tests failing - irrespective of his patches. This is certainly possible and certainly seem like extenuating circumstances. After all, we don't expect gsoc students to fix all the mistakes other people make, do we?
I'm completely at a loss to understand why this student was failed. My confusion is not helped by the fact that the mentor has quite clearly stated that he is pleased with the quality of work and the patches are in good shape. In addition, he also says that the student would probably finish the project. Why in the world are we failing this student then?
It makes me extremely sad to see that we as a community would fail a student because we sometimes have issues with reviewing things promptly (which is perfectly reasonable in itself) and because we are simply ignoring extenuating circumstances that are not in the student's control and failing them based on a rule we set up in the past while completely ignoring the spirit behind it.
Is this the state that our community has been reduced to? The same community that encouraged me to learn new things, try out things I thought were beyond my understanding, and even encouraged me to ask stupid questions publicly on IRC? Because in the end, we're all learning? I am indeed sorely disappointed.
If this is what we have been reduced to, then it seems like we have failed as a community to encourage open source contributors - and that really, really hurts.
Cc: QuimGil, jayvdb, EBernhardson, Legoktm, darthbhyrava, Xqt, Mpaa, valhallasw, kaldari, polybuildr, pywikibot-bugs-list, Aklapper, Billghost, zhuyifei1999, Sumit, Zppix, 01tonythomas, Lethexie, Mdupont, fbstj, Catrope, Jay8g
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