On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 12:22:00PM +0100, Erik Moeller
wrote:
Sj-
Nonsense. Money is an excellent resource when
properly applied, but
there is no fundamental reason why we should have fewer volunteer
developers than Linux has, for instance. After all, what are we
writing but the kernel for our collective intelligence?
An interesting comparison. However, it is worth noting that there is a
billion dollar industry behind the Linux kernel, and many of its most
active developers are directly employed by corporations like IBM, Novell
and Red Hat. Hence, development tends to be driven by corporate interests.
On the other hand, there's a much lower bar for entry into working on
projects like Wikipedia developing content, which is in plain English
(or whatever language you're using), and even for entry into working on
the MediaWiki software (PHP web application design is considerably less
hairy than hacking kernel code). Your points stand, basically, except
that you might be underestimating the effectiveness of pure volunteerism
in many (not all, but many) aspects of the entire Wikimedia family of
projects.
--
Chad Perrin
[ CCD CopyWrite |
http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Hoi,
When you edit in English, it is easy to use Mediawiki, try however to
edit something like
and you
apreciate one reason why our Farsi and Arabic communities are so small.
When you remove the <div class="plainlinks"> and look at the page in
page preview in Firefox, you appreciate why this stupid external source
indicator is another reason to for needing futher improvements. All the
special codes are available in the Roman script. When you edit in Farsi,
you do not have the characters available to
[[media:en-insert.ogg|insert]] a soundfile ..
When this threat started, it pointed out that many languages and
projects do not benefit from sorely needed developer attention. When we
cannot rely on your underestimated volunteerism, I hope we are not only
able but also willing to pay our way out of obstructions like this. We
have plenty of room to improve the usability and accessability of
knowledge that is NOT encyclopedic based and is not in a Western
language. This asperation is 100% in line with what the Wikimedia
Foundations stands for.
Please apreciate that I do not think the work done by all of the
volunteers is not great and important. My point is that it is biased and
not effective in particular ways. I disagree with your assertion that
the volunteerism is effective for projects other than wikipedia. I do
think that we can redress this inequality by investing in software that
DOES help other scripts and other projects.
Thanks,
GerardM