Dirk Riehle wrote: What could be more important is to ensure that anything done for free stays free. It would be shameful to have volunteer efforts tied up by someone else's patents. The question of who should benefit from online work is very much an unsettled area with broad societal implications. Many of us do feel a sense of being net contributors to society when we altruistically spend many hours in Wiktasks. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, it does not put bread on the table, and it does not pay for our hardware. It is difficult, however, to imagine a working economic model that would insure that the benefits of our efforts are shared equitably. Ec

On Sun, 2006-16-04 at 15:52 +0200, Dirk Riehle wrote: As far as I know, there are 1-2 programmers working for Wikimedia and more people working at Wikia on MediaWiki. I just talked today with Jack Herrick of wikiHow who'd like to see their additions fed back to MediaWiki. There are a lot of MW installations out there, and a lot of people hacking MW code for fun and profit. I'm pretty sure that this isn't a problem whatsoever. To be sure, the main focus of MW has been and will always be Wikimedia's sites, but I know that the MW team has been very welcoming of patches and additions at least from Wikitravel in the past. I think the most likely patches and changes to be accepted are going to be security and/or performance patches, or extensions that can be easily plugged and unplugged. Radical changes to the behaviour of the software, or stuff that's "unwiki", or stuff that is unstable or slows down the software, is probably not going to get accepted. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_extensions I think just adding a patch to a bug on bugzilla is the fastest way to get something added to the codebase. ~Evan -- Evan Prodromou <evan(a)prodromou.name>