Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
There was a discussion in August 2004 about
implementing a bounty system
for MediaWiki development. Anthere ran a survey in july 2004 among
developers and published results on meta on August 25th 2004:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_payment_poll/results
A bounty system assumes someone (unpaid? community vote? donator
decides?) can define the tasks and assign the bounties. One
question in Anthere's poll was "Which tasks, if any, really ought
to be done, but currently are not?". That method of design can
only result in a bazaar. To build a cathedral you need an
architect with somewhat dictatorial powers, and the authority and
salary for an architect is the least likely outcome of a bounty
system. For example, what if there is a $2000 bounty for adding
complex graphics and another $2000 bounty for improving
performance? These bounties are in conflict. Who is to decide?
Eric Raymond thinks bazaars are better than cathedrals because of
this lack of authority, but not everyone agrees with Eric Raymond.
For example, Linus Torvalds' architectural control over the Linux
kernel is a good example of dictatorial powers at their best.
Wikipedia has been extremely successful despite (not because) the
lack of a technical architect, especially in the last two years.
Some people ask how the Swedish Wikipedia can be the 5th biggest
with a language spoken by only 9 million people. One strong
reason is that the Swedish wiki community enjoyed sub-second
response times at susning.nu in 2002 and 2003, while Wikipedia's
utter sluggishness during software phase II and III scared away
thousands of volunteers. After susning.nu closed, this community
has moved over to the Swedish Wikipedia. Just imagine if
Wikipedia had performed like that in every language. And once
again, I do this only to promote Swedish language among Germans:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-July/017624.html
While I appreciate Anthere's outreach, the board should not ask
the developers which features need to be implemented. The board
should promote growth of free contents (e.g. more encyclopedia
articles, more dictionary definitions, more photos, etc.) and
investigate why some sectors are growing slower than others. If
there are technical bottlenecks, such as slow response times or
lacking features, the developers should be informed and asked (and
perhaps paid) to help the situation. The goal is never technical
features, but the quicker generation of more contents. This is
just like any commercial company where the board monitors
customers and sales, except that the Wikimedia Foundation is not a
profit-optimizing organization but a free-content-optimizing one.
So don't ask why the Swedish Wikipedia is growing so fast, ask why
all the others grow so slowly. We can do better than this.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se