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?
It's an issue of scale. Do you have any idea how big the foundation projects are? Inefficient code could cripple our donation-supported infrastructure. It's not that people don't want to use the newest and coolest toys, it's that in order to keep the sites running at all the foundation really needs to aim for a functional level of minimalism.
Why do developers have such priviledged access to the source code, and the community such little input?
In my experience, this is the way that most open source projects operate. You can download and play with the source code to your heart's content, but typically only a handful of "committers" have access to modify the code. Average joe user like you and me can submit patches if we see fit. Through patches we could build trust among the developers and eventually become committers. I would be very interested to hear about other successful open source projects that didn't use any kinds of safeguards like this.
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?
well, the core software does improve and grow through normal development effort. We wouldn't want a situation where improvements could not be implemented without community approval. Foundation projects run on MediaWiki software, and updates to the software are reflected in the projects. It's not like they're installing things as big and pervasive as Semantic MediaWiki without community approval.
Why does the Foundation need 1 million for usability when amazing tools continue to be ignored and untested?
And who says that money isn't going to be used to test existing tools? Without money, our developers are all volunteers, and they will do the testing they want to do when they have time to do it. Let me ask, are you doing any testing of potentially useful MediaWiki extensions yourself?
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?
Whatever the design turns out to be, I'm sure we're going to need developers to implement it. Plus, there are tons of existing usability requests at bugzilla, and not enough development hands to even implement the things the community has already asked for. Plus, there are all those cool pre-existing community-developed extensions that need to be tested by developers.
Why is this tool not being tested on Wikipedia, right now? http://wiki.ontoprise.com/ontoprisewiki/index.php/Image:Advanced_ontology_br...
Why would it be, has the community requested it? Again, it's economy of scale: Wikipedia is too huge to serve as a beta test for all sorts of random extensions. A smaller website like Wikibooks would be a much better place to do extension testing, and in fact has been used in the past as a beta test site for new extensions. You can't load just any software onto Wikipedia and expect the servers to handle it well. Wikipedia is simply too huge for that kind of avant garde management.
--Andrew Whitworth