An'n 03.09.2010 19:43, hett Aryeh Gregor schreven:
Nikola Smolenski has done great work on Interwiki
transclusion. But
nothing has happened since two years. If I were a member of the tech
department at Wikimedia, I'd be enthused and would put all my energy in
reviewing his code, straigthening out any remaining problems and making
it real as soon as possible. I mean, making interwiki bots obsolete,
making obsolete like hundreds of thousands edits per day, that would be
an amazing improvement, wouldn't it? This dormancy worries me.
There is no
dormancy. You are making the cardinal error of feature
requests: assuming that if you think something is important, everyone
else must too. Quite simply, other people aren't as interested as you
in this particular feature. They're working on other things that they
feel are more interesting or important. In the end, the people who
are doing the work, or paying for it, call the shots on where
resources are invested -- there is nothing that can change that.
The people who are
paying for it... Hm, and by that you mean the
Foundation? Cause, the money comes from the users, by donations. And the
Foundation's purpose is to be the executing branch of the community.
I certainly have a POV. My POV is that of "let's make MediaWiki a more
powerful tool" and of "let's make MediaWiki easier for the wiki users".
If I look at the techblog post linked by Erik Möller I see some new
features that are aimed at the wiki users, like LiquidThreads, Upload
and AddMedia wizard, and Pending changes. But I also see several
features that are aimed solely at the Wikimedia employees, like media
storage architecture, monitoring, resource loader, CentralNotice,
Analytics, Selenium deployment, CiviCRM upgrade, and fraud prevention.
I don't want to say that these projects are bad ideas. They are
certainly very good ideas. But they have no big advantages to the
average wiki user.
In my opinion the work of the wiki volunteers is viewed as a cheap
resource. Well, it _is_ cheap, it doesn't cost us anything. But we
should value it more. Every day hundreds of working hours by our
volunteers are wasted to set interwiki links. This work would be
unnecessary if we had a central interwiki repository. In my own home
wiki more than three quarters of all edits are done by interwiki bots,
cluttering the edit histories.
So if you say that my support of the central interwiki repository is
based on false assumptions of importance then I really don't like your
assumptions of importance.
The central datawiki could immediately make available information on
millions of topics in dozens of languages with very few effort. It would
also improve the reliability of all our existing articles, even on
projects with big communities like en or de. If that is less important
than improved spamming using CentralNotice, then please tell me. The
oldest proposal for Wikidata I could find on Meta (although it's not
unlikely that the idea is even older) is from 2004 and was proposed by
Erik Möller. There are a bunch of other proposals for the same. So there
are much more people who deem this important than just me.
Maybe I appear as a grudgy grouser who dispraises your hard work and
doesn't contribute much myself, but all I want is that somebody maybe
says "oh, remember the days when we didn't care about financing plans
and fundraising and deployment and maintaining our servers, but when we
had visions about free access to the sum of all human knowledge!"
Marcus Buck
User:Slomox