On 8/14/07, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
If by "let's get to work" you mean "let's create a free/open solution", then great! :)
If you mean "let's integrate the proprietary, non-free tool", then I have to disagree. Relying on non-free resources to fill in gaps in the free resource universe leads to complacency and damages the motivation to create a more widely useful free resource.
I'm not really in a position to build an AJAX based image-editing suite from scratch. I don't have enough experience in javascript, PHP etc. OTOH, I think I can probably, possibly with a bit of help, hack some sort of integration with the 3rd party site.
So, if someone is really enthusiastic about building image editing into MediaWiki, and is willing to lead the project, then I'd love to help. I'm skeptical that the result will be as good as Picnik, but it will probably be good enough. Obviously I prefer the creation of open source software.
However, if this is just kind of idle campfire speculation, like which would be better, given no constraints, then I would rather get started on an achievable solution. There is very little work involved in the Picnik integration, presuming that we can make web-to-wikipedia uploads work.
Also, given that the relative amounts of work required for the two solutions are probably more than 10 to 1, it wouldn't be a terrible thing if we started with the Picnik integration, saw how useful it was, then used that to motivate people to write a native solution.
So, who's putting their hand up to do some coding? Or alternatively, can sketch out a plan for what needs to be done and is willing to answer questions about how MediaWiki works etc?
Steve