On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 10:15 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
I think I'd add "general direction of
centralizing everything under a single
Wikimedia Foundation is a bad idea" as a permanent blocker.
As others have noted, there's a difference between offering data
(which we do - we've spent a lot of time, money and effort to ensure
that stuff like
dumps.wikimedia.org works reliably even at enwiki
scale) and providing a working environment for the dev community.
Having a primary working environment like Labs makes sense in much the
same way that it makes sense to have a primary multimedia repository
like Commons (and Wikidata, and in future probably a gadget
repository, a Lua script repository, etc.). It enables community
network effects and economies of scale that can't easily be replicated
and reduces wasteful duplication of effort.
That said, I'd love to make more real-time data feeds available for
third parties in general. The analytics team is currently looking into
offering a sensible alternative to the IRC feed for edit metadata, for
example.
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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