Volunteer Developers
6 statements.
| Author | Tags | Primary Session | Secondary Sessions | Position Statement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Katie Horn | Third Parties, Volunteer Developers | Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community |
WMF should focus on the technical issues it is uniquely positioned to handle, and let the volunteers have the fun stuff. When we think about what technical work the WMF is engaging in, I don't believe enough time is spent considering volunteer motivation, and the great potential we are systematically choosing to ignore, or end up devaluing entirely due to the inherent unpredictability of volunteer work. I do believe that there is a long enough history of deeply understaffed WMF engineering teams getting set up to tackle fancy front-facing projects, only to have those teams simultaneously struggle to deliver, and deter everyone else from getting too near decision-making in their territory. It is time to change our approach. I would like to talk about what it would take, to refocus the majority of WMF's technical work away from taking full ownership of all the 'important' new ideas, and toward making it as easy as possible for momentarily highly motivated outside parties to make meaningful contributions to new features. I imagine many new tools would be required to scale release engineering, security, and the technical community in general. We would have to take a greater role in mentoring interested parties. There are also known big hairy unsolved problems in the way we currently think of maintainership. Major changes would have to be made in our current approach to product timelines and product/project management. Of course, there will always be things that do require a high level of predictability in the outcomes. Donor money can and should be spent on ensuring predictability around the things we absolutely cannot function without. However, there is a whole world of ideas that absolutely do not have to be accomplished on a strict 'shipping' timeline, and it seems that the WMF will always hold the keys to that door. I would like to figure out how the WMF could start embracing that unpredictability at every level, and move much more deliberately from 'bottleneck' to 'enabler'. | |
| Melody Kramer | Communication, Communities, Retention, Volunteer Developers | Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community |
How do we maintain and grow the technical community and ready it for the mission ahead? Maintaining and growing a technical community is difficult, particularly when the majority of that community is contributing their time and code on a volunteer basis. However, we can look at other successful projects for guidance, to see what we can learn and apply to our own movement: Clearly articulating the value for participants. It's important that we articulate what participants will get (socially, professionally, personally) from contributing to our projects, and it's important to socialize that value through feedback loops, communication, and positive reinforcement. One of my favorite projects - the Smithsonian Transcription Project - hired a full-time community manager for their volunteer community. It was her role to pair participants with projects, follow up to ensure things were going well, and intervene if changes needed to be made. Creating feedback loops that reinforce the value for participants. It's not enough to get people in the door; we must continually reinforce why participation is meaningful for both participants and the mission of free and open knowledge. People will have different reasons for participating - some want to build a skilset, others want to contribute to a meaningful project, still others are completely an assignment. The value for all of these participants differs, and the messaging/communication should reflect that. Finding pathways to participants through non-technical means. GitHub does it particularly well. They want to reach students. So they have a space - https://education.github.com/ - aimed at teachers. This is a particularly smart strategy: How do we reach participants where they are, and think about conduits who might identify possible participants?
Continually communicate the value: The best open source projects continually communicate to participants and the larger world about what's happening. Someone files their first bug report? Great, maybe they get an email saying 'Here's the next step you can take.' Someone creates a tool for Tool Lab? It's amazing? Send them to the blog for a profile. Let's elevate their work and use it to bring others in. | |
| Kunal Mehta | Code Review, Volunteer Developers | Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community | Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki |
We have well established that volunteers are the lifeblood of the Wikimedia movement. We prioritize their contributions and work to ensure they are given the tools they need to succeed. But in the Wikimedia development community, we've neglected volunteers instead of nurturing them - and this is a serious problem that we need to rectify. There are a lot of areas where we can improve, but I'm going to focus on just one: improving the volunteer developer's code review experience. While Wikimedia Foundation product teams are building new things, it's usually the volunteers who are keeping critical tools that the community depends upon alive (AbuseFilter, CheckUser, etc.). The MediaWiki codebase has gotten so massive that it's not practical to try and have the Wikimedia Foundation attempt to maintain all of it. It would not be a good use of movement funds either. Instead, I'm proposing that we utilize our volunteer base and ensure they are the valued and respected members of the Wikimedia development community. I think we can do it in three steps: first, set reasonable standards for code and the review process, second, prioritize code review of patches coming from volunteers, and finally empower volunteers to be maintainers and owners of code and create a sustainable community. 1. Set Reasonable Standards for Code and the Review Process The status quo is that depending on who reviews your code, you will have a wildly different experience. Some will mandate that principles like dependency injection are followed or others will require 100% test coverage. And others might not care for any of that and just ensure the code does what it is supposed to before merging. But the people who face the worst of it are volunteers - WMF staff will have consistent reviewers through teammates who already communicated standards for merging code. So we need reasonable standards for code we accept, and use those throughout the review process. As an example of 'reasonable', if someone is trying to fix a bug in legacy code that is difficult to test, it would be unreasonable to mandate a test case before merging the fix. 2. Prioritize code review of patches coming from volunteers Our current process of reviewing volunteers' patches after finishing code review for teammates isn't working - we have a giant pile of unreviewed patches. When you start your day and look through your list of reviews, pick one or two patches from a volunteer and review them first. Most likely it'll take minimal time, but for previously-neglected volunteers, it will make a big difference. 3. Empower volunteers to be maintainers and owners of code Some of our volunteers have been around for quite a while and are well trusted. Let's give them +2 rights! There's nothing that makes you feel better than getting an email from someone telling you that your contributions are valued and they'd like to nominate you for +2 access (exactly how I got hooked). And quite a few years I'm still around, so it must have worked. |
| Moritz Schubotz | Artificial Intelligence, Code Review, Testing, Volunteer Developers | Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community |
Title Developing software in a wiki way Background Over the last 15 years, MediaWiki evolved from a simple PHP script to a complex and highly integrated family of products and services, serving knowledge to billions of humans. Every change might cause an instability or a complete failure of the system. Thus, measures including code review, automated unit testing and code/ product ownership, have been established to guarantee the stability of the software. The drawback of this approach is that improving the software became very challenging for volunteer contributors. This proposal seeks to lower the barriers for volunteer contributors while maintaining the stability of the system. Advice (1) Reduce the effort of code review by applying Artificial Intelligence methods. Thus, reviewers can focus on non-formal comments. (2) Develop a dialog platform that ensures that volunteer contributors are aware of the next steps and the roadmap for their change on the way to production. (3) Establish a team that supports volunteer developers, who want to make a difference that is not listed in the annual plan by providing temporary code or product ownership. (4) Improve testing and evaluation to measure the effect of every single change and to identify code or even whole services that are no longer neccary and can be switched off. | |
| Santhosh Thottingal | Languages, Machine Translation, Open Source, Technical Debt, Volunteer Developers | Next Steps for Languages and Cross Project Collaboration |
Mediawiki is one of the rare software system where the i18n is done right. This infrastructure need timely improvement and maintenance. The technology and resources for supporting that technology is important as 2017 movement strategy states: 'We will build the technical infrastructures that enable us to collect free knowledge in all forms and languages.'. But most of these infrastructure is running under volunteer capacity and no official team responsible. 1. Opensource strategy - Mediawiki language technology is isolated and a less known in general opensource ecosystem. There is a need to have proper ownership, maintenance and feature enhancements as good open source project, so that our contributions comes from other multi lingual projects, while we help with our expertise. (a) Our localization file formats and the libraries on top of them are very advanced and supports languages more than any other system. But it was when the libraries made mediawiki independent, other projects started noticing it. We use that independent library(jquery.i18n) for VE, ULS, OOJS-UI and present in mediawiki core. But it is not actively maintained, issues and pull requests not addressed because there is nobody in foundation now in charge of it, except volunteer time. There is a lot of demand for its non jquery, general purpose js library. Code is aged, tech debt is increasing. (b) We developed one of the largest repository of input methods(100+ languages) to support inputting in various languages and an input method library. This is a critical piece of software for many small wikis - jquery.ime. The code is aged, not actively maintained by anybody from foundation, except some in their volunteer time. Not updated to take advantage of browser technology updates about IMEs. This is a mediawiki independent open source library. (c) Universal Language selector - a language selection, switching mechanism for our large list of languages, also delivering input methods, fonts, need ownership and tech debt removal. Navigating between different wikis is done using this and now the team authored this system does not exist.This is a also mediawiki independent open source library. VE, Translate, ContentTranslation, Wikidata depends on this library. (d) Mediawiki core i18n features(php) are also started showing its age. There were plans to make some of them as standalone opensource libraries. Not happened. Nobody officially responsible for this infrastructure too. 2. The Translate extension - helping to have mediawiki interface available in 300 languages - something that we always proud of - is not officially maintained by foundation now. The localization happens because of volunteers and volunteer maintaining Translate extension code. Moreover, the translatewiki.net, which hosts the Translate where localization happens by volunteers also outside foundation infrastructure. 3. It is time to have machine translation infrastructure within wikimedia. Content translation used machine translation - but that is an isolated product. Translation of content can be used in various contexts for readers. CX tries to provide a service api for MT, There are lot of potential for that. Multiple MT services, even proprietary services might be needed to cover all the languages. At the same time, our content and translations are important for training new opensource MT engines. 4. Wikipedia follows very traditional approach for typography and layout. Language team had limited webfont delivery to aim missing font issue, but too old code not got any updates in last 3 years or so. Language team plans to abandon that feature due to maintenance burden, but not happened and no team now owns it. Other than this a few wikis does common.css hacks to have customization of default fonts. Typography refresh attempt from reading team was for Latin. Every script has its own characteristics about font size, preferred font family sequences, line heights etc. Presenting knowledge in all these language wikis, in 2017 or later need serious thoughts about readability, typography and general aesthetic of wikipedia in a language compared to other websites in that language. | |
| Sam Wilson | Drupal, OpenStreetMap, Third Parties, Volunteer Developers, WordPress | Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki | Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community |
tldr: Encourage use of MediaWiki outside WMF projects, because does so furthers the mission (and improves the software). MediaWiki is primarily a tool that helps the Wikimedia movement. The movement is not primarily about MediaWiki, but MediaWiki is the central tool with which we are currently fulfilling our mission. Lots of other people use MediaWiki too, but their needs are not the focus of WMF development. I think we should do more to encourage 3rd party use of MediaWiki, and in doing so broaden the developer community and end up with higher-quality software that is easier to use for more people. Our mission is about empowerment and education, and people running their own wikis should be seen as part of that. Just because content isn't hosted on WMF servers doesn't mean it's not part of the movement. I imagine a future in which MediaWiki is as common for collaborative websites as WordPress is for blogs, and people don't have to rely on Facebook, YouTube, GitHub, etc. to host their content. A couple of parallels (sort of):
One reason that MediaWiki is not better for 3rd party users could be that there are not all that many non-WMF people making a living out of developing for it, at least not in comparison with other web frameworks (Drupal, WordPress, etc.). WordPress had to be easy to install on cheap web hosts because that's all there was; MediaWiki seems these days to only have that characteristic as a historical hangover, and it could well end up moving away from being aimed at amateur sysadmins all together. Perhaps there's a fundamental clash between the scale requirements of the WMF sites vs. the ease-of-administration requirements of 3rd party wikis - but if there's a choice to be made, it should be explicit and well-communicated. At the moment, it feels like it's happening by attrition. |
