This post is not technical, but it *is* specifically about Mediawiki. Over the years all of us have become familiar with Jimbo's famous comment about "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge", which eventually became the official "Vision" of the Wikimedia Foundation. (See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vision.)
Over time I've thought about the software which enables that vision. Mediawiki is extraordinary software with outstanding potential that does incredible work. Sometimes when we focus on its current technical limitations we can lose that perspective. Personally, when I think back over the limitations that bothered me in the past, I realize that given time, each and every one them was always solved in the end, and the functionality has progressed to a degree that would have been hard for any of us to imagine a few years ago. For this I am personally grateful to all of the people who have continued to develop Mediawiki and implement its functions on the various projects. (Just in case anybody is wondering, I have absolutely no specific requests left that I need to have implemented. Everything is done and already works. This is pure gratitude. :-) The point of my post is this: On my Wikipedia user page I have a sentence which I would like to suggest as a software "vision" complementary to Jimbo's famous statement. I am surely no Jimbo, but I do think the sentences flow very nicely together and are quite true. I am also no programmer or developer, but I think my sentence accurately reflects what the work that you, the software and hardware people, do, means to those of us who use it around the world: Jimbo: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Me: Mediawiki Software is the best tool in the world for collecting and organizing human knowledge, in all of its forms and in every language. There are more comments on my WP user page. Further thanks (on the "every language" aspect) go to the people at http://translatewiki.net. So whatever you want to call this (vision, slogan, mission statement, true advertisement), it is my suggestion for a simple statement of what MW is all about and why it is so great. Anyone want to adopt it? Dovi _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
