Hi Leigh, Personally I don't think its in our interests to end up with LQT supporters versus MW Discussion page traditionalists. As you say - you don't want to get into another debate about WikiEd features.
My anecdotal evidence from folk I've been taking to around the world is basically that experienced Mediawiki users prefer the "blank slate" of the standard MW discussion page. Newbies are confused by the standard talk pages and associate and participate better with a more traditional discussion forum structure. In many respects we have the best of two worlds - each post is a wiki entry & can be edited by anyone. However, we also have all the added benefits I mentioned in an earlier post. Since WikiEd's inception we have been lead by the open source philosophy of release early and release frequently. In this way we share the load in identifying bugs, feature requests etc within the context of a live working community. In the long run I believe this will pay dividends for the project. Our work is being fed into futher enhancements funded by Wikia - so we've made a substantive contribution! My personal vision for Wikieducator is that it becomes a self- sustaining community project including the financing of technical infrastructure. I would like to see a WIkiEducator where institutions from around the world cough up real dollars in support of the infrastructure, and in turn take community responsibility for the tough ICT decisions -- we still have a long way to go before we reach this utopia. In this way the community can also take ownership of the tough ICT decisions. As you know, the integration of additional features through a variety of extensions comes with the responsibility of upstream compatibility. We have done our best to minimise maintenance dependencies as the Mediawiki software evolves. As a community, we have also made valuable contributions in helping Mediawiki refine and improve its feature set. There are also very awkward tensions regarding our commitment to free software. Already WE supports the use of flash and the MP3 format -- I don't like it, but we've done this in support of educators in their work. To date folk like Erik have been helping us. I should emphasize that Erik has donated hours of his time as a volunteer and WE would not have been possible without Erik's foresight and guru status in the global MW and wiki community. (BIG thanks Erik!) So far, I think we've done a reasonable job in living out our second value, namely that we believe: "In the freedoms of all educators to teach with the technologies and contents of their choice, hence our commitment to Free/Libre and Open Source technology tools and free content." WE can certainly be taken to task by the free software purists. Personally - I'm uncomfortable with the use of no-free formats. As an educuator working in the development arena, I feel that (for me) its unethical to use proprietary software. If anyone out there says to me -- Wayne that's a cool piece of software, I don't want to refuse the request to help my neighbor because of copyright or patent restrictions. Living an upright WE life is not going to be easy - but I think we're doing pretty well so far <smile>. Thanks to everyone who is helping us turn the vision into reality including the folk who keep us on our toes with ongoing challenges. For me this represents a healthy and transparent community. Cheers Wayne --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
