On 8/14/07, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
If by "let's get to work" you mean
"let's create a free/open solution",
then great! :)
If you mean "let's integrate the proprietary, non-free tool", then I
have to disagree. Relying on non-free resources to fill in gaps in the
free resource universe leads to complacency and damages the motivation
to create a more widely useful free resource.
I'm not really in a position to build an AJAX based image-editing
suite from scratch. I don't have enough experience in javascript, PHP
etc. OTOH, I think I can probably, possibly with a bit of help, hack
some sort of integration with the 3rd party site.
So, if someone is really enthusiastic about building image editing
into MediaWiki, and is willing to lead the project, then I'd love to
help. I'm skeptical that the result will be as good as Picnik, but it
will probably be good enough. Obviously I prefer the creation of open
source software.
However, if this is just kind of idle campfire speculation, like which
would be better, given no constraints, then I would rather get started
on an achievable solution. There is very little work involved in the
Picnik integration, presuming that we can make web-to-wikipedia
uploads work.
Also, given that the relative amounts of work required for the two
solutions are probably more than 10 to 1, it wouldn't be a terrible
thing if we started with the Picnik integration, saw how useful it
was, then used that to motivate people to write a native solution.
So, who's putting their hand up to do some coding? Or alternatively,
can sketch out a plan for what needs to be done and is willing to
answer questions about how MediaWiki works etc?
Steve