Thanks... I know this is a provocative question but I meant it just as it was stated, nothing more, nothing less. For better or worse my history with the foundation is too short to know the answers to these questions.
All the assumptions in my question are up for grabs, including the assumption that we're even primarily developing MediaWiki for WMF projects. Maybe we think it's just a good thing for the world and that's that. Anyway, I would question that it doesn't take a lot of effort to keep the core small -- it seems to me that more and more of the things we use to power the big WMF projects are being pushed into extensions and templates and difficult-to-reproduce configuration and even data entered directly into the wiki, commingled indistinguishably with documents. (As you are aware, it takes a lot of knowledge to recreate Wikipedia for a testing environment. ;) Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online collaboration has to happen, nobody in this group says "Let's make a wiki page!" That used to happen, but nowadays they go straight to Google Docs. And that has a lot of downsides; no version history, complex to auth credentials, lack of formatting power, can't easily transition to a doc published on a website, etc. I'm not saying MediaWiki has to be the weapon of choice for lightweight collaboration. Maybe that suggests maybe we should narrow the focus of what we're doing. Or, get more serious about going after those use cases. On 12/29/10 1:55 PM, Ryan Lane wrote: >> Question: assuming that our primary interest is creating software for >> Wikipedia and similar WMF projects, do we actually get anything from the >> Windows PC intranet users that offsets the cost of keeping MediaWiki >> friendly to both environments? In other words, do we get contributions >> from them that help us do Wikipedia et al,? >> > > As someone who originally started contributing from maintaining a > small MediaWiki instance, I kind of dislike this question. I also > don't think we should be mixing "we" when discussing WMF and > MediaWiki. > > But to answer your question: yes. We get contributions, we get > employees, and we get a larger, more vibrant community. A number of > contributors come from enterprises and small shops, but they often > don't contribute directly to Wikimedia projects. However, their > contributions often allow other people to use the software in > environments they couldn't be used in otherwise (LDAP authentication > is a perfect example of this). The people who then get to use the > software may turn into contributors that do benefit WMF. > > MediaWiki is created primarily for WMF use, but a lot of other people > depend on it. I advocate the use of the software by everyone, and > emphasize in talks that we want contributions from everyone, even if > they don't benefit WMF. I don't think we should discourage this. We > should really try harder to embrace enterprise users to get *more* > non-WMF specific extensions and features. > > It doesn't take that much effort to keep core small, and maintain > extensions for WMF use. I honestly don't think this is a limiting > factor to the usability of WMF projects, either. > > Respectfully, > > Ryan Lane > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
