Hi all, I am very disappointed by current development process we have on wikimedia project. The wikimedia project itself is classified as open source at some point, but the current development process sort of beats the purpose of that.
I started working on two extensions in October, more than 6 months ago. Both were approved by community on Village Pump and it was agreed to deploy them to english wikipedia. One of the extension had hundreds of lines and is considered as "bigger", the other one consist of +- 15 lines of code, which was developed together with Ian Baker who is employee of the wikimedia foundation. I was told that in order to deploy it, I need to pass code review. I requested code review many times on many places and although it was more than 6 months ago, no one seemed to be able to review these 15 lines of code so far, despite the community agreed with the idea of extension. I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf sites. If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are suggested to do. While this is secure for the foundation, so that it can actually have perfect control over the code which is wikimedia running on, it is sort of against the idea of open software. So, it should be either described how this works, because if what I just said is true (I hope it's not) it should be definitely somewhere noted, to avoid getting more volunteers spending time on pointless work, or the development process should be completely changed so that it allows this "open source" project, to be actually open. Thank you _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
