Well, I believe my concerns have been adequately addressed. I have only one last point of input on usability (for now ;-). I believe it my be the case that the often bizarre idiosyncrasies of MediaWiki were implemented because the developers were spread out around the world, in isolation, communicating only over IRC and sometimes e-mail. I know there are yearly developer spurts at Wikimania, but I do not know about the daily development environment at the offices, and whether development continues in a largely isolated fashion. It seems that it would be prudent to accept consulting advice from Ward Cunningham, as he not only invented wiki collaboration, but revolutionized programmer collaboration with Extreme Programming. It is not prudent to allow developers to collaborate in any manner of their choosing, as it will often be far below what is optimal. If you want to spend the money wisely, and avoid the common pitfalls prevalent in MediaWiki's fragile design, you must ensure the developers are working side by side and following certain rules.
Cheers,
On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2009/1/9 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
Erik I am glad you are still around and keeping an eye on things.
Thank you, I appreciate that. :-)
I believe that, with the audience the Foundation has access to, it could save a lot of money by hiring people who love Wikipedia and want to work
for
it. I don't think its true that the only way to get seasoned developers
is
to wave a large carrot (aka $$$) in front of their face. I believe there exist experienced developers who would gladly give a year of their life, working at a lower wage, to work on Wikipedia.
That is evidently true. In fact, everyone we're hiring accepts that they are going to be paid under market rates. We are also working with remote contractors on specific projects. If you are interested in working as a remote contractor, or you know brilliant people who would be, make a pitch to jobs at wikimedia dot org. We have put a general note on the job openings page that we appreciate hearing from people who are passionate and interested throughout the year, regardless of current openings.
As for advertising this extremely broadly, I think that would be doing a disservice to serious candidates as we simply would be drowning in applications. (Sometimes, we already are.) And, having reviewed CVs for almost every position that we've hired for in 2008, I can tell you that arriving at a reasonable shortlist in a fair and accurate fashion is a lot of work - and with the exception of some sanity filtering, it's not a task you can easily give to someone else. We might try it regardless, but only if we have a process in place to deal with the predictable level of interest. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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