You have to think that the primary audience dev.wikimedia.org wants to attract is the big population of developers that want to build their own projects and know Wikipedia just as users. These developers will ask what Wikimedia can do for them before thinking what can they do for Wikimedia. Contributing to our projects it's not their motivation and maybe not their thinking at all. At least today.
Yet... by using our APIs they will be contributing to spread Wikimedia's free knowledge, and maybe once they learn more about our APIs and our projects they will also contribute to improve that knowledge sending actions from their users in our direction. A portion of those developers might miss a specific feature in an API, or a specific API altogether, and then we can show them our FOSS side, and ask them to share their plans and send us patches. Still, for each third party developer that ends up contributing code to our projects there will be many more that will remain as third party developers, busy with their own projects. However, if they keep using our APIs more and better, they will also contribute more and better to our mission. We haven't done much for third party developers, and this dev.wikimedia.org project attempts to change this trend. On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 2:53 PM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: > I don't see how pointing people to the > Wikidata home page or Commons home page or a list of Wikimedia projects is > helpful at all and these are the three most prominent links on the page. > Most of these developers don't know what Wikimedia has to offer apart from Wikipedia. They have never heard of Commons or Wikidata, and they have never really thought that they could get from us repositories of media and structured data. I agree that the homepage of these projects is not the best destination, but this is a pragmatic prototype using what is available. Now imagine that, instead, these three links would point to three pages, each of them introducing these areas (basically text, media, data) and highlighting what developers can do with them. P.S. If it sounds as though I'm frustrated Note that probably the complementary side of your frustration is the frustration of designers and others trying to improve Wikimedia and its projects, only to find a strong resistance to change almost every time that fresh ideas are proposed. In our case here, currently we are not very successful at attracting third party developers to use our APIs, definitely not at the scale that one would expect considering Wikipedia's relevance. We welcome ideas and help from people willing to solve this problem. We are happy to take risks trying solutions, even if that means that we will make some mistakes along the way. -- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
