The WordPress 6.9 release cycle is underway, but it follows the same path as the WordPress 6.8 release, moving forward without any documentation team leads. As the release team experiments with a smaller team to reduce coordination overhead, the decision not to include documentation leads in the release cycle is raising concerns in the community.
The Current Concerns
The new approach for release cycles emphasizes collaboration between Make Team Representatives as highlighted, “ This streamlined structure places more emphasis on collaboration with the various Make Team Reps, who are encouraged to help coordinate efforts from within their respective teams…..The goal is to reduce the overhead on the Release Squad while still ensuring each team’s contributions and priorities are represented throughout the cycle.”
Estela Rueda stresses that documentation is not optional but essential to the project, warning that excluding it from the release team sends the wrong message about its importance and discourages contributors, “ Documentation is not a “nice-to-have,” it is a survival requirement. It’s not something we might do if someone has time; it’s something we must do — or the whole thing breaks down at scale. Removing the role from the release squad, we are not just sending the message that documentation is not important, we are showing new contributors that working on docs will never get them to the top of the credits page, therefore showing that we don’t even appreciate contributing to the Docs.”
Estela Rueda first raised concerns in the Core Slack Channel, saying recent team changes have led to last-minute documentation work and poor planning during releases. She also recalled being told at the recent WCEU that documentation was no longer involved in releases, signaling to contributors that the team’s work was considered unimportant, “ “docs wasn’t even involved in releases any more so they were not going to waste their time contributing to an unimportant team.”
In response to this, a decision was taken to include a Docs Liaison as suggested by Mary Hubbard for this cycle, though Estela Rueda emphasizes that future releases need a documentation lead and formal inclusion in the process, “ To support the smaller release team experiment, we agreed with @4thhubbard to compromise on having a Docs Liaison for this release. But this needs to be rethought on every release. Docs needs a structure/inclusion in future releases which should be a lead.”