Barbarians at the Gates..of the WMF

[Kumioko]

Someone named Tim Moody posted the following comment to the Wikimedia list and I thought it may be of interest to folks here. I posted it nearly complete to preserve it because as we all know members of the community have a tendency to delete things they don't like to help evade scrutiny. So far it hasn't garnered any comments from the community but here is the link: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/ ... ?sort=date

The question of support goes beyond financial.

As the volunteer who wrote and deployed the mirror of Our World in Data used by WikiProjectMed and deployed the VideoWiki application, I have to say that, unfortunately, I have not found WMF technical staff very supportive.

This is all the more surprising given that there is a Developer Advocacy team that is 'tasked with supporting the technical communities who use Wikimedia web APIs and software projects to spread and improve free knowledge' and 'to actively recruit and mentor new technical contributors', but who seem to perceive their role as protecting the organization from those very volunteers. I often encounter an attitude that says that we are incompetent noobs that must be managed by staff, and any error or lack of familiarity with WMF internal systems can be met with derision and sarcasm.

There is no doubt that WMF applications and infrastructure are an extremely valuable resource, but it would be nice if volunteers could be similarly regarded. I have spent much of the last 10 years working on projects that further WMF goals and core values. I would prefer to do so in a collegial or even collaborative way.

The staff who manage WMF systems and infrastructure are smart, competent, and well organized, but they are not very generous. They seem to regard the rest of us as barbarians at the gate.

Unfortunately he sugarcoated things here. There are competent staffers sure, but most of them are incompetent charlatans. He is right though that the treat community members like barbarians and they are right to do so because most of the people in the community are even bigger jerks than the staffers.

[wexter]

Proles - a social class that forms the lowest level of society - Most Wikipedia editors
Outer Party Hardcore Wikipedia Editors and Administrators
Inner Party - Wikimedia Foundation

We have seen this sort of stuff before..

[SkepticalHistorian]

Are the tech-programmer guys paid? I had an interaction with them on their tech geek page, Phabricator and they were very helpful/ responsive. (Several others reported the same problem.)

[Kumioko]

It depends. There are paid ones that work for the WMF but there are also unpaid ones that are volunteers so to speak.

[ericbarbour]

The staff who manage WMF systems and infrastructure are smart, competent, and well organized, but they are not very generous. They seem to regard the rest of us as barbarians at the gate.

And, I would interpret this in a very simple way: they regard outsiders as "barbarians", because Wikipedia is a paranoiac cult. They have the worst case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome in the entire IT world, that I know of--even worse than the wagon-circling done in big corporations like IBM or Microsoft.

It's perfectly okay to write a bot to edit a MediaWiki site's contents, but don't ask the MediaWiki developers if it's "okay" or not. Because then you will be a "suppressive personality" who has to be stopped. And don't even DREAM of asking them to correct bad code you find in the current version of MW. Unless many other people make the same complaint, YOU WILL BE IGNORED.

Just FYI: the bastards are STILL fighting over the "Visual Editor". Only the English comments usually get any response. And the response is usually a blunt dismissal from Sherry "Whatamidoing" Snyder. Nothing new there. You're just supposed to use it, and STFU about any problems you find.

She also wrote this, should you ever need a laugh.

[Kumioko]

A lot of the best and most often used software actually came from outside the WMF "we build failures" engineering team. Some examples:

-AWB
-JWB
-the abuse filter
-cluebot
-iabot
-A lot if the plugins for Mediawiki came from 3rd party developers.

And theres a lot more. My point is, when they are unwilling to assist the volunteer developers, they're showing their true selfish intentions.

[ericbarbour]

A lot of the best and most often used software actually came from outside the WMF "we build failures" engineering team.

Quite true. Some of the most popular and useful bots (also some of the most evil vandalism patroller software, like Huggle) had absolutely nothing to do with the WMF developers and never received any "official recognition". Despite being used by dozens of administrators on a daily basis.

We need to again mention the old complaints about MediaWiki being a torturously written hunk of "spaghetti code" in PHP, a scripting language that was obsolete by the time Wikipedia became popular in 2005. Eventually they HAD to clean it up, if only because Tim Starling and Brion Vibber were the principal authors and had not bothered to document or comment most of their code, because no one dared to question their domineering roles. Jimbo Liked Them and that's the end of the argument. You can't run something like that without documentation so other coders can work on it. Classic WMF: operating like a street gang with a code of silence.