Topic on Project:Village Pump

Honoring our volunteer devs

7
WhatamIdoing (talkcontribs)

I've been a little frustrated recently by a couple of users who don't seem to understand how important our volunteer devs are. It's not entirely their fault; they're just so new, compared to MediaWiki's existence, that they have no idea that the entire concept of MediaWiki software was a volunteer achievement. The WMF devs are working on some large, high-profile projects, and the result is that "volunteer dev" sounds like "second-class dev" to these new folks.

So I have just started a page, How to become a MediaWiki hacker/Volunteer achievements, on which I've listed a couple of obvious, user-facing changes that were written by volunteer devs (even if said devs were later paid to work on MediaWiki).

I'm secretly hoping someone will tell me "No, that's just a poor duplicate of <this much, much better page>", but, failing that, if there's anything that you did, or that you know someone else did as a volunteer, please expand. I'd like people who are interested in become hackers to know that volunteer devs can do real things here, and for non-technical users to be able to see that volunteer devs have created many of the things that they use and rely on every single time they read or edit the site.

Thank you–to all the volunteer devs, for doing your work, and to anyone who can help me expand this page, for helping honor that good work and educate the next generation of users about our debt to the volunteer devs.

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

This is a great idea. Could you post this to the mediawiki-l and wikitech-l mailing lists? If you can't, would you mind if I post your message there?

Nemo bis (talkcontribs)

I've added a link there. Usually, I do this on the MediaWiki release pages: you'll notice that most stuff on 1.21, 1.22, 1.23, 1.24 is done by volunteers.

I'm not sure how to expose such information without duplications nor ghettos, there would be two extremes:

  • highlighting volunteer contributions on MediaWiki history: could only be very high level (as your stub currently is);
  • filling in the "assignee" field on bugzilla for hundreds of particularly important bugs: very atomic, not super-readable.

As an aside, it's easy to find the conversation you probably had in mind and I'm not sure the person meant to depreciate volunteer work, rather the opposite.

WhatamIdoing (talkcontribs)

I've seen more than one of these conversations in the last year or two, and different users have different views. Some agree with me that it's awesome that volunteer devs do so much. Some seem to be dismayed that critical infrastructure is left to mere volunteers.


Mark, you should feel free to post a link to the page any place that you'd like.

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

I would disagree that critical parts of the infrastructure are "left to mere volunteers". If a volunteer fills a need, the Foundation doesn't necessarily look to replace them with a paid employee. There have bee critical bits of infrastructure that have been handled by volunteers, but many of them have been hired as full time employees.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

I think that your idea of what constitutes "critical infrastructure" might be narrower than some other people's. ;-)

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

I've no doubt that is true.

But now I'm curious: What do you think my definition wouldn't include that others would?

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