On 11/06/2013 02:33 AM, Quim Gil wrote: > > Do the three architects consider themselves assuming this role as WMF > > employees or as community members? >
For myself -- I've been a Wikipedia & MediaWiki community contributor since long before there was a Wikimedia Foundation. I still think of WMF as the new kid on the block... ;) That said, my employment at WMF is what pays my bills and ensures I keep the majority of my attention poking at the Wikipedia and MediaWiki ecosystem (currently concentrating on the mobile world with a slice of general maintenance, code review, and architecture planning). When I spent a year and a half working at another company, I did find I had much less time to spend on MediaWiki. > > Do they consider their roles to be part of a MediaWiki centric > > meritocracy or a Wikimedia centric meritocracy? > MediaWiki's development is traditionally Wikipedia- and Wikimedia-centric (not necessarily Wikimedia Foundation-centric); it was created for Wikipedia and I personally got involved in it to support Wikipedia's various multilingual editions. Generalized usage of MW has always been a secondary, though important, goal, and I expect Wikipedia/Wikimedia will continue to be central in MW's development for the forseeable future, even assuming we put a lot more effort into third-party support (which I think we should!) I also caution against use of the "meritocracy" term, as I think it's pretty loaded and has a history of enabling stagnation and ingraining of cabals and antisocial behavior in free software communities. While I certainly like to think I've earned my fancy title with years of hard work, there are strong social/popularity and random-event components in any kind of ranking like this. > > What is their opinion about moving forward their current team of three? > I'm not sure the "architects" really exist as a team of three; I feel like that's a fairly arbitrary selection of longtime contributors who, currently, have "architect" in their job title. There's similarity in subsets of what we do, and some direct overlap -- Tim and I both comment on code and code designs and do the occasional big RFC review session; Tim and Mark both comment on and help debug ops and performance issues -- but we're not the 3 Musketeers... :) > > Because these three long-term contributors have earned their community > > reputation and are clearly smart, the chances are that many of us would > > agree with any common answer they would agree with themselves. > :D -- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
