On 15/08/11 18:14, Fred Bauder wrote:
I'm
just trying to evaluate the scale of the risk here. The amount of
resources that we need to spend on this should be proportional to the
risk.
-- Tim Starling
That technical staff have effective power to decide whether a fork is
justified is reason enough.
I'm not in a position to actually allocate resources to this or to
decide whether it's justified. I'm asking these questions mostly for
my own curiosity, and in case someone seeks my opinion on it in the
future.
When you launched Internet-Encyclopedia, I was very positive about its
utility. Brion and I gave it all the support it needed. The "green
link" feature in particular required Wikinfo to be whitelisted in the
server configuration so that it didn't get blocked for its high
request rate. I reviewed Proteus's fork of MediaWiki to see if there
were any changes that we could reincorporate. So it's not like I'm
staunchly anti-fork.
-- Tim Starling
Tim,
Yes, your help was greatly appreciated.
Here's the conclusion I've come to though. We need to get the software
good enough, and simple enough, that it is firmly in the background.
Mediawiki is like an old DOS computer that constantly drags you into
programing mode, particularly if you fork. We need the equivalent of a
Macintosh that almost anyone can use effortlessly. The emphasis needs to
be on content, not on trying to figure out extensions and templates.
Fred