An'n 03.09.2010 19:43, hett Aryeh Gregor schreven: > >> Nikola Smolenski has done great work on Interwiki transclusion. But >> nothing has happened since two years. If I were a member of the tech >> department at Wikimedia, I'd be enthused and would put all my energy in >> reviewing his code, straigthening out any remaining problems and making >> it real as soon as possible. I mean, making interwiki bots obsolete, >> making obsolete like hundreds of thousands edits per day, that would be >> an amazing improvement, wouldn't it? This dormancy worries me. > There is no dormancy. You are making the cardinal error of feature > requests: assuming that if you think something is important, everyone > else must too. Quite simply, other people aren't as interested as you > in this particular feature. They're working on other things that they > feel are more interesting or important. In the end, the people who > are doing the work, or paying for it, call the shots on where > resources are invested -- there is nothing that can change that. The people who are paying for it... Hm, and by that you mean the Foundation? Cause, the money comes from the users, by donations. And the Foundation's purpose is to be the executing branch of the community.
I certainly have a POV. My POV is that of "let's make MediaWiki a more powerful tool" and of "let's make MediaWiki easier for the wiki users". If I look at the techblog post linked by Erik Möller I see some new features that are aimed at the wiki users, like LiquidThreads, Upload and AddMedia wizard, and Pending changes. But I also see several features that are aimed solely at the Wikimedia employees, like media storage architecture, monitoring, resource loader, CentralNotice, Analytics, Selenium deployment, CiviCRM upgrade, and fraud prevention. I don't want to say that these projects are bad ideas. They are certainly very good ideas. But they have no big advantages to the average wiki user. In my opinion the work of the wiki volunteers is viewed as a cheap resource. Well, it _is_ cheap, it doesn't cost us anything. But we should value it more. Every day hundreds of working hours by our volunteers are wasted to set interwiki links. This work would be unnecessary if we had a central interwiki repository. In my own home wiki more than three quarters of all edits are done by interwiki bots, cluttering the edit histories. So if you say that my support of the central interwiki repository is based on false assumptions of importance then I really don't like your assumptions of importance. The central datawiki could immediately make available information on millions of topics in dozens of languages with very few effort. It would also improve the reliability of all our existing articles, even on projects with big communities like en or de. If that is less important than improved spamming using CentralNotice, then please tell me. The oldest proposal for Wikidata I could find on Meta (although it's not unlikely that the idea is even older) is from 2004 and was proposed by Erik Möller. There are a bunch of other proposals for the same. So there are much more people who deem this important than just me. Maybe I appear as a grudgy grouser who dispraises your hard work and doesn't contribute much myself, but all I want is that somebody maybe says "oh, remember the days when we didn't care about financing plans and fundraising and deployment and maintaining our servers, but when we had visions about free access to the sum of all human knowledge!" Marcus Buck User:Slomox _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
