Erik,
I am skeptical of the current development process. That is because it has led to the current parser, which is not a proper parser at all, and includes horrifying syntax.
The current usability issue is widespread and goes to MediaWiki's core. Developers should not have that large of a voice in usability, or you get what we have now.
We do not even have a parser. I am sure you know that MediaWiki does not actually parse. It is 5000 lines worth of regexes, for the most part.
In order to solve usability, even for new users, I believe that you must write a new parser from scratch.
Are you prepared to do that?
On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 4:05 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2009/1/9 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
Why are so few community-developed mediawiki extensions used by the Foundation?
Most of them aren't applicable (YouTube, Google Maps extensions, etc.) or not tested to the scale of Wikipedia and would therefore require significant investments of resources to be ready for deployment.
Why do developers have such priviledged access to the source code, and
the
community such little input?
I disagree with the underlying premises. There are more than 150 committers to the MediaWiki SVN. Commit access is granted liberally. Code is routinely updated and deployed in a very open fashion. BugZilla is filled with thousands of community requests. The backlog of requests is now more aggressively processed.
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?
I disagree with the underlying premises. For example, developers don't deploy any feature we/they like. Features which are likely to be disruptive are only deployed after community consultation. An example of this is the FlaggedRevs extension, for which a clear community process has been defined.
Why does the Foundation need 1 million for usability when amazing tools continue to be ignored and untested?
In part, to stop ignoring and start testing them.
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?
In part, to be able to accommodate such input.
Why is this tool not being tested on Wikipedia, right now?
http://wiki.ontoprise.com/ontoprisewiki/index.php/Image:Advanced_ontology_br...
SMW is a hugely complex tool. Along with other approaches to handle information architecture, it merits examination. Such examination will happen as resources for it become available. The priority for obtaining such resources will compete with other priorities such as usability, internationalization support, rich media support, etc. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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