User talk:MZMcBride/Bugs

Brainstorming

 * Might be nice to be able to tag bugs or categorize them in some other way by wiki family (wikisource, wikipedia, etc.) or by specific database (enwiki, zhwiki, etc.) in order to see trends and get better statistics. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MZMcBride (talk • contribs) . Please sign your posts with ~ !

"Bugs bugs bugs"
Is "Bugs bugs bugs" supposed to be sung to the tune of Boys (Summertime Love)? Anyway, I think that developers will always tend to prioritize their own "Low" and "Lowest" priority pet projects above those projects requested by the public, and in most cases there will be so many developer pet projects that the devs will never get around to doing those the community asks for. Management could intervene, but usually that will just be to get management's pet projects implemented (often with disastrous consequences). The solution? More community members should become volunteer devs. Volunteers have the most freedom to pursue those low-priority bugs.

How do we get community members to become devs? Probably by making it easy and obvious how to get started. Is there anything more we can do besides steer them in the direction of the "how to become a MediaWiki hacker" page and point them in the direction of the annoying little bugs? Maybe let them pick a bug and then have a mentor assigned who is familiar with that area of the codebase (or vice versa, let them pick a mentor who will assign them a bug). Or maybe the mentor isn't necessary; have there been any problems, that we know of, with novice devs trying to fix a bug and not being able to get any help? (If we don't know, that could be a sign that there was such a problem but nobody noticed.) Leucosticte (talk) 17:36, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
 * There's now a "developers" link in the footer of every Wikimedia wiki. That's a start. If you have other ideas for getting people involved, there are many people who would be interested. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 11:47, 26 December 2013 (UTC)