Lately, I've tried to make some large improvements, primarily in
the Swedish language Wikipedia. Sometimes this has succeeded,
sometimes it has failed or been delayed. Some of the delays have
been due to failing server functionality, either at WMF or on the
toolserver. We're victims to our own success. Provisional hacks
tend to get so successful, that people start to rely on them.
I really want to get better geo tagging going in the Swedish
Wikipedia. To this end, WikiMiniAtlas was activated some weeks
ago. The activation went just fine. But the underlying database is
not up to date. This is because Stefan Kühn is rewriting the
script that extracts geo coordinates from the database dumps, and
he has many other things to do. I don't blame him. He's doing a
very good work, when he finds some time for it. But even if he had
a solution ready, current database dumps might not be available.
Suppose database dumps were ready and WikiMiniAtlas was up to
date, and I would have some idea for a contest among Swedish
wikipedians to add more coordinates to articles with prizes being
awarded to the top ten contributors. That's the kind of project
for which I could apply for money. That money could cover some
costs for the toolserver or for the ticket for somebody to go to
the developer meeting. It would have many good side effects.
Of course, the WikiMiniAtlas is just one example of a very
successful toolserver project that could generate such benefits.
Another example: Apparently the Dutch Wikipedia community has some
tool (?) to facilitate image uploading, that we might want to
adapt to Swedish. But that's not running on the toolserver today,
so we would also have to find somewhere to host it. This can of
course be solved, but what would the best solution be?
My question: when we see such opportunities, how can we make
better use of them? The toolserver team has a list of "stable"
services which are (at least) more stable than the rest. But how
can we invest in making them even better and more stable, so other
projects can build upon them?
One idea that I had was to transfer such projects to the central
Wikimedia servers, and make them a part of the WMF infrastructure.
This would hopefully make the services more stable, and free up
resources for more experimentation on the toolserver. Lately, I've
become more skeptic about that plan, since they seem to have more
work than they can really handle.
Another idea is to set up a separate toolserver for Scandinavia.
I heard some rumours that Wikimedia Norge (Norway) has resources
to do this. But perhaps it is wiser to invest in the existing one?
I'm very happy that the new hardware has arrived and is being
installed. It's unfortunate that it took so long for this to
happen. How can we make resource planning work smoother in the
future? There are millions of users who expect us to perform
better, and I think they will send money if we ask them.
What are we short of? Money? Then say so. People? What kind?
So, who is the idiot that writes this message? I'm user:LA2 and my
full name is Lars Aronsson. I'm a C/UNIX programmer from Sweden.
Back in 1992 I started to scan old Scandinavian books under the
name Project Runeberg,
http://runeberg.org/ and after having
started to scan encyclopedias (not just poetry and novels),
finding Wikipedia was a perfect match. I've scanned two minor
encyclopedias for the German and English Wikisource. I've also
been an active contributor to OpenStreetMap since 2005. I happened
to visit Berlin in 2004 when Wikimedia Deutschland was formed. In
October 2007 I helped to create Wikimedia Sverige (Sweden) and has
been a board member since. In 2008 we organized Wikipedia Academy
in Sweden. That's not the only idea we have copied from the German
chapter. We're now in talks with libraries and archives to see if
we can have some major content exchanges. I've been to Wikimania
in Frankfurt (2005) and Alexandria (2008).
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se
Wikimedia Sverige - stöd fri kunskap -
http://wikimedia.se/