Developers

Developers are people who write software, in this case MediaWiki-related software. They are said to have "commit access" (or to be "committers") if they have access to commit changes to the central Subversion repository where the latest copy of the software is stored. (This is in contrast to having shell or root access to Wikimedia Foundation servers, for instance, which would make them system administrators. Users with root access could presumably grant themselves commit access if they so desired, since Subversion is now on the Wikimedia cluster.)  Brion Vibber, as lead developer, is usually the one to grant commit access, but Tim Starling has done so sometimes as well, possibly along with others.

A full and up-to-date list of committers is at http://svn.wikimedia.org/users.php. That list (as of 17 July 2007) is reproduced below with some commentary. Many of the people on the list do not work on MediaWiki proper, although at present, anyone with commit access to one project at least theoretically has commit access to any other on Wikimedia's Subversion server. There are also plenty of people who have submitted patches on Mediazilla and we love them very dearly, but they can't really be called developers.

Those with "root" or "shell" access might not really be developers, but rather system administrators of Wikimedia servers, where the Subversion repository is stored. In many cases they rarely use their commit access, or if they do, only to maintain non-MediaWiki things in the repository. In principle they probably have admin access on Subversion, Bugzilla, and so on if they have some reason to use it, at least in the case of roots.

To see which developers are actually active, try http://www.ohloh.net/projects/22/contributors, which gives nice stalkerish summaries of all sorts of fun statistics.

History
Developers formerly had an important role in the Wikipedia power structure, since they were the only ones able to create sysops or ban users.

Some developers had shell access to the California servers, but due to inactivity, weren't given shell access on the "new" Florida servers. Magnus Manske, Nick Reinking, Lee Daniel Crocker, Axel Boldt, Matthias Jordan, Neil Harris and Ed Poor are in this category. Note that Ed Poor was not involved with software development, but instead carried out what are now bureaucratic or sysop tasks, such as promoting sysops and locking accounts. Past MediaWiki software development activity level of developers may be found through CVS statistics.

The following users had CVS access on Sourceforge. Since April 2006, Subversion has been used instead. Angela Beesley (expired shell), E23 (snok) (expired shell), Tomasz Wegrzanowski (expired shell and root), Guillaume Blanchard, Axel Boldt, Rowan Collins, T.D. Corell, Lee Daniel Crocker, The Cunctator, Johan Dahlin, Peter Danenberg, Michael Dill, Andrew Dunbar, Emmanuel Engelhart, Andre Engels, Fantasy, Tom Gilder, Jan Hidders, Anders Wegge Jakobsen, Matthias Jordan, Shane King, Thomas R. Koll, Niklas Laxström, Christian List, Wil Mahan, Magnus Manske (CVS admin), Zoran Obradovic, Julian Ostrow, Nicholas Pisarro, Jr., Evan Prodromou, Nick Reinking, Derek Ross, Valerio Santinelli, Chris Seaton, Alexander 'Ajvol' Sigachov, Chuck SMITH, Bogdan Stancescu, Marian Steinbach, Tarquin, Timwi (MediaZilla admin), Anders T&ouml;rlind, Zhengzhu, and Rob Church.

External link

 * MediaWiki developer map

Other languages: ja:Wikipedia:&