On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
Why are so few community-developed mediawiki extensions used by the Foundation?
Are people asking for them? Are there bugs open asking for review? Are there problems with the current code? Does it scale to WMF level? Things like this need answering. We can't just go enable 360+ extensions in SVN (and heaven knows how many more floating around the internet) site-wide without careful consideration.
Why do developers have such priviledged access to the source code, and the community such little input?
Because allowing the software to be edited on wiki would make a nightmare to review and would delay scap by weeks on end. As pointed out by several other people, Brion and Tim are pretty liberal with giving out commit access. Pretty much just earn the trust of your fellow developers, hang around #mediawiki, submit patches, that sort of thing. Just as enwiki, commons, frwikisource all have their respective communities, MediaWiki has its own :) It's all about getting involved.
Why must the community 'vote' on extensions such as Semantic MediaWiki, and yet the developers can implement any feature they like, any way they like it?
As a general rule of thumb, the "votes" in bugzilla are largely ignored, so "voting" for bugs isn't really helping anyone. However, before things are implemented on wikis, the core developers (those who will enable your extension) want to make sure there's a consensus for it. Just respecting the wiki principles by which we work.
I also take argument with your second statement, that developers can implement anything they like and get away with it. This is most certainly not true. Ask any non-core developer how many times Brion or Tim has reverted their changes, and I'm sure most of us will raise at least one hand.
Why does the Foundation need 1 million for usability when amazing tools continue to be ignored and untested?
I believe Erik (and others?) have said that reviewing existing tools is a goal for this grant. No point in reinventing the wheel if we don't need to (unless the wheel is a square shape, in which case it might need some fixing :)
Why has the Foundation gone ahead and approved the hire of several employees for usability design, when the community has had almost zero input into what that design should be?
Because perhaps they want to start making progress, rather than spending a year debating it and making no solid progress. There are _known_ issues with MediaWiki's usability, and part of this new team's job is to collect all the known issues, identify more, and begin fixing them. I don't see how a debate on foundation-l (or elsewhere) will help them in this goal.
Why is this tool not being tested on Wikipedia, right now?
http://wiki.ontoprise.com/ontoprisewiki/index.php/Image:Advanced_ontology_br...
I go back to my first question: has anyone asked for it?
I think your original post sets forth an incorrect assumption. "Why is the software out of the reach of the community?" It most certainly is not, as anyone is welcome to join in and pitch their $0.02. However, we're not going to go around and advertise a debate on all the wiki village pumps about some new feature. Experience has shown us that if the wikis do not agree with a particular change, they make sure to let us know in no uncertain terms :)
-Chad