User talk:RobLa-WMF

Meetings notes

Hi! I've centralized and standardized meetings notes at Meetings. Please let me know if you have any concerns. --MZMcBride 22:48, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Thank you so much for copying on wiki WMF Projects/OWA/OWA Meeting 2010-11-18 etc.! Do you know if there's a way to make Etherpad produce a complete list of public pages created on the installation? Thank you, Nemo 23:32, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Other projects cannot share the same MediaWiki global variable names

What did you mean in [1] by "most other projects cannot share the same MediaWiki global variable names"? Given that our globals are namespaced by a $wg prefix, namespace collisions doesn't seem a problem for third parties. Platonides 21:46, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

The abundance of globals in our software is in direct conflict with the coding standards of most projects. Maybe they technically could reuse components from our system, but they won't. -- RobLa-WMF 21:57, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

"backcompat" tag and being a pedant

My initial thought is that your email to wikitech-l about the tag "backcompat" is counter-intuitive, and a labelling "backincompat" may be more explicit.

My concern is that "backcompat' can be ambiguous. it can mean either

• that the change *is* backwards compatible so mark it as such; or
• that the change "is incompatible" so mark it as such

To the geeks it may be obvious, to those of us speaking English it is less so. Anyway, just 20c worth of thoughts for consideration before it progresses. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:13, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Test

testtesttest

Platform engineering

Hi, I'm Edward and I am writing a book on Wikipedia. I am trying to understand how the WMF budget is spent, but I not a computer expert and I am struggling to understand the difference between 'technical operations' and 'platform' and things like that. I'm assuming that technical operations is stuff like servers and datacentres and wires and routers and things, whereas 'platform' is more like MediaWiki software. Would that be about right? Sorry for being an idiot. (I do run a wiki myself as you can see from my user page, but that's about as far as it goes). Edward Buckner (talk) 18:51, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi Edward, not a stupid question at all (I get asked this a lot), and you basically have it right. Wikimedia Platform Engineering mainly deals with the MediaWiki side of things (as well as some other things that require intensive software development, such as our custom layer between Lucene search engine and MediaWiki). Platform Engineering has four subteams, actually, only one of which (MediaWiki Core) fits that description. The other subgroups (Engineering Community, Quality Assurance, and Analytics Engineering) do work that is suggested by their names. The Wikimedia Platform Engineering page attempts to break this down. Hope this helps! -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 01:57, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Hey Rob that's really helpful - many thanks. Edward Buckner (talk) 20:06, 25 February 2013 (UTC)