Tim Starling (t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au) [041119 23:27]:
I'm sorry if I caused offence, I just wanted to
impress on everyone that
Wikipedia has barely any developers. If you're ever wondering why some
feature hasn't been written yet, it's because there's been no-one around
to write it. Most of the active developers seem to be more interested
writing features for a general audience than for Wikimedia projects.
There's more editors on the Old English Wikipedia than there are
developers overall. Maybe Matt doesn't want to help, and that's fine. I
get the feeling Gerrit doesn't either. But is there anyone? Every second
Wikipedian seems to know a programming language. We just need, say, two
or three developers willing to put in a few hours per week.
Hmm. I am tempted to learn PHP just for my favoured features (though I
haven't written anything more complicated than a shell script with a loop
and a condition for over a decade) - as if I haven't got enough things
using my time ;-)
A suggestion: would it be worth putting an ad in the top line of the
article pages? The place where donation beg notices go. "Wikipedia needs
volunteer developers. PHP and Python. No fortune, a small amount of fame.
Your MediaWiki needs You!" With the last sentence being a link to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker .
- d.