On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 10:57 PM, Tim Starling <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 16/01/15 15:04, Rob Lanphier wrote: > >> I believe no one would dispute the credentials >> > of every member of the group. Brion, Tim, and Mark have an extremely >> long history with the project, being employees #1, #2, and #3 of the >> WMF respectively, and all having contributed massively to the success >> of Wikipedia and to MediaWiki as general purpose wiki software. In >> most open source projects, one of them would probably be BFDL[5]. >> Roan and Daniel are more "recent", but only in relative terms, and >> also have very significant contributions to their name. >> > > It's not a community open source project, it is an engineering > organisation with a strict hierarchy. We don't have a BDFL, we have a VPE. Alrighty, Tim, I have a great deal of respect for you, and all of the good things I've said about you in this thread are objective facts, not me buttering you up. But this is an area where a lot of people are dying for you to step up, and have been for some time. As someone who has been your manager for several years now, I have to openly giggle at the "strict hierarchy" characterization :-) On the leadership front, let me throw out a hypothetical: should we >> have MediaWiki 2.0, where we start with an empty repository and build >> up? If so, who makes that decision? If not, what is our alternative >> vision? Who is going to define it? Is what we have good enough? >> > > Sorry to labour the point, but the way to go about this at present is > pretty straightforward, and it doesn't involve the architecture committee. > You just convince the management (Damon, Erik, etc.) that it is a good > thing to do, get yourself appointed head of the "MediaWiki 2.0" team, hire > a bunch of people who agree with your outlook, get existing engineers > transferred to your team. It's not even hypothetical, we've seen this > pattern in practice. All it would take is for you to muse out loud on this list "hey, what is up with 'MediaWiki 2.0'?" (or whatever it is), and we could have a productive conversation about that. If the argument for its potentially misguided nature is made with respect and kindness, it will be welcomed. I've clearly touched a nerve here. I knew I was risking that, and I'm sorry that I didn't find the exact way to raise the points I needed to raise without doing so. But I'm not sorry I started this conversation. There's a lot of folks here at the organization who have been agreeing to disagree for waaaaay too long, and we've gotta come clean here. For you or anyone on my team (or for that matter, anyone) who wants help figuring out how to have a productive conversation on wikitech-l about important issues, I'm happy to help out. Rob _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
