Re: [Foundation-l] Usability grant

Gregory Maxwell wrote: I expect we all recognize that software is not the solution to every problem. As far as improving the learning experience for new contributors, I certainly hope this doesn't cause anyone to give up working on other avenues and tackling any cultural challenges that should be addressed. The purpose of this grant, however, goes beyond just simplifying a particular process, so from that perspective it's not a question of whether software is the best way to do that. Rather, we're treating the MediaWiki software as a critical aspect of the overall environment for our projects, and one that can and should be improved. "Best-of-breed" it may be, but I think it's apparent that sometimes it hinders efforts that need help, so I consider it worthwhile to reduce the obstacles it introduces to our environment. Indeed we have not gotten it right the first time, which is why we have accepted this grant, as we keep trying to get it right. I believe that's the logical fallacy known as "argument from vaporware". Just because software might change how things work in the future doesn't mean we should avoid working on other improvements in the meantime. Unless we know that a specific feature is in the works and will conflict with the proposed solution, there's no reason to forbid experiments. Otherwise, I think I'd happily start nuking unsightly infobox markup on the theory that some future software can be counted on to automatically generate the information from article prose. It is just prototyping for the Semantic Web, after all. --Michael Snow