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
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