GNSM as an extension was hardly "essential" for Wikinews. (Don't get me wrong though, it certainly was nice). Prior to it being deployed to Wikinews, I bet less than 10% of Wikinewsies actually knew what it was let alone thought of it as a necessity. Well technical support for the sister projects could be better, it isn't horrible by any means (and if it is, people can always {{sofixit}} and all. you know, that whole open source thing). Bawolff (talk) 22:40, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think that's the point...telling people to {{sofixit}} doesn't work when you still need developers to oversee the code to make sure it doesn't actually break the wiki. Even Wikipedia, as big as it is, has had similar problems with the developers before. NW(Talk)01:32, 21 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
In fairness it's not just the small wikis that have had to wait years for bugs to be addressed. There is some conversation going on right now about the disjunction between the (developer/sysadmin) technical community, the WMF and the broader Wikimedia community. The main problem seems to be one of communication, with the three groups being unaware of what the other groups are doing. Compounding that, most of the more vociferous members of each community believe that they understand "pretty much" the area in which the others operate - and while this is true compared with "Jo Random", it is certainly does not appear to be the case, for example, that most of the board, contractors or full time developers are actively and extensively involved in project work. And of course those that "back in the day" were active admins, article writers, template wranglers, policy developers and gnomes (yes I mean they had all roles) naturally believe they understand the project, but things have changed so much in the last few years that many basic premises are outdated. And of course the same applies in reverse (although many Wikimedians are currently charitable trustees, software engineers, project mangers, researchers or lawyers for their day job). RichFarmbrough, 17:07, 23 September 2011 (UTC).[reply]
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