Hoi, It is that time of year where money is asked from the people. Arguably we would do more when the Wikimedia foundation was not so FF-ing Wikipedia centred.The arguments for not giving Wikisource have passed their sell by date and usability for exposing its wonderful work is imho a disfigurement on the resume of the WMF (among others). This is a cheap one to fix. It makes sense to fix it as I understand sources are part of "Wikimedia Zero" and it would make a world of a difference when the sources can actually be found.
Unicef among others has fundraising campaigns for education because it is not its most important priority. As long as kids die because of lack of food, safe water, preventable disease and temperature it is obvious why. Such an excuse the WMF does not have. It could ask for additional funding for Wikisource, for Wikidata for ... and it would have a solid argument. Thanks, GerardM
On 3 December 2015 at 10:25, Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Under the redesigned grants scheme, WMF Project grants might be able to help with this kind of software development work for Commons and/or Wikisource. I happen to know a developer here in Cascadia who might be interested, either as an individual or in association with a Wikimedia affiliate, in doing this kind of work on a grant or contract basis.
Pinging Kacie for comment about possible grant funding. (:
Hi Pine, thanks for the comment. I understand what you mean, and I do believe there is space to work on Wikisource via grants, BUT.
But I already did a Individual Engagement Grant in 2013 (with David Cuenca) regarding Wikisource. It was great, but IEGs don't give you staff time. So me and David used Google Summer of Code, and we mentored 4 projects: if I'm not mistaken, only one was really finished, meaning it produced concrete results on Wikisource. Others stopped before (for example, two dedicated mediawiki extensions were not put in production). Within the IEG, we made a big survey among Wikisource communities, to develop a wishlist and a roadmap for WS communities. We set up a Wikisource Community User Group. We talked and talked. Bugs were and are reported, from years. Two weeks ago, we convened the very first internationl Wikisource conference, in Vienna, hosted by Wikimedia Austria (3 members from WMF were there, and we had a great and productive time, reports will follow).
I've personally been involved in all of these efforts, so I've also seen that real impact of Wikisource infrastructure (core WS extension, design, interface, performance, development) has been minimal. I don't really want to have this conversation here and now, but I have had a fair amount of experience in this to say that until the WMF (or some affiliate big enough and high enough in the software pipeline) commit to WS, change won't magically happen by itself. We have practically one real volunteer developer, and he's full of work to do (also, I already asked him if he would like to receive a grant to work on certain issues, and he can't, and he's the only one who could do that, thanks to his unique experience).
Grant works for little things, I'm afraid. Major change requires something else.
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