Developers/es



Los desarrolladores son aquellas personas que contribuyen al código del software MediaWiki. Ellos comentan cambios en el repositorio central de Git para llevar modificaciones a revisión en, dónde está almacenada la copia más reciente del software. Entre los desarrolladores se incluyen personal pagado de la Fundación Wikimedia y voluntarios. Luego de crear un, cualquier usuario puede proponer un cambio para revisión, pero solo los maintainers pueden fusionarlo. To see which developers are actually active, try https://www.openhub.net/p/mediawiki/contributors, which gives nice stalkerish summaries of all sorts of fun statistics.

Developers are not to be confused with system administrators, who are people having shell or root access to Wikimedia Foundation servers, where the code repository is stored. They might not really be developers; in many cases they rarely use their commit access, or if they do, only to maintain non-MediaWiki things in the repository.

Maintainers
A maintainer of a specific project (including MediaWiki core or an extension) has +2 access to the relevant Git repository, so that they can merge patches others submitted. They usually regularly respond to bug reports and changeset review requests. A list of maintainers are kept at Developers/Maintainers.

History
Historically, developers also managed Wikimedia Foundation servers (now managed by system administrators). Before bureaucrat and steward groups were created, developers were the only ones able to promote and demote sysops, and lock user accounts (before the "block" feature of MediaWiki existed). Thus they had an important role in the Wikipedia power structure.

From April 2006 to March 2012, Subversion was used. Only people with Subversion commit access (which must be approved by SVN administrators) could submit codes. Codes submitted to Subversion were merged to MediaWiki codebase immediately (though only be manually deployed to Wikimedia wikis by a system administrator), and may be reviewed by "coders" before they are deployed. In January 2013, the MediaWiki SVN repository was made read-only. All active projects have moved to Git.