"Marcus Buck" wiki@marcusbuck.org wrote in message news:4C8172C8.1030609@marcusbuck.org...
The people who are paying for it... Hm, and by that you mean the Foundation? Cause, the money comes from the users, by donations. And the Foundation's purpose is to be the executing branch of the community.
No, the purpose of the Foundation is to fulfil its stated vision and principles. People join the communities, or donate, because they agree with that vision; both are donations, or either money or time, towards the famous "free access to all human knowledge". The Foundation does *not* serve the community, nor the other way around; they work together in symbiosis, the community doing the bulk of the heavy work, the Foundation being a more streamlined and efficient decision-making process to guide the development.
I certainly have a POV. My POV is that of "let's make MediaWiki a more powerful tool" and of "let's make MediaWiki easier for the wiki users". If I look at the techblog post linked by Erik Möller I see some new features that are aimed at the wiki users, like LiquidThreads, Upload and AddMedia wizard, and Pending changes. But I also see several features that are aimed solely at the Wikimedia employees, like media storage architecture, monitoring, resource loader, CentralNotice, Analytics, Selenium deployment, CiviCRM upgrade, and fraud prevention.
I don't want to say that these projects are bad ideas. They are certainly very good ideas. But they have no big advantages to the average wiki user.
In my opinion the work of the wiki volunteers is viewed as a cheap resource. Well, it _is_ cheap, it doesn't cost us anything. But we should value it more. Every day hundreds of working hours by our volunteers are wasted to set interwiki links. This work would be unnecessary if we had a central interwiki repository. In my own home wiki more than three quarters of all edits are done by interwiki bots, cluttering the edit histories.
So if you say that my support of the central interwiki repository is based on false assumptions of importance then I really don't like your assumptions of importance.
No one is saying that CentralInterwiki isn't important, or that it wouldn't be a huge improvement. We're saying that there are other projects which are *more* beneficial to Wikimedia, in terms of increasing our reach, drawing in new editors, and improving productivity, that are therefore more deserving of our perpetually limited development time. Please understand the difference between "not important" and "not _as_ important as...".
Maybe I appear as a grudgy grouser who dispraises your hard work and doesn't contribute much myself, but all I want is that somebody maybe says "oh, remember the days when we didn't care about financing plans and fundraising and deployment and maintaining our servers, but when we had visions about free access to the sum of all human knowledge!"
Yes, those were the days when Wikimedia was a tiny fraction of its present size, and where users were uploading dozens of duplicate files to each wiki individually, where the technology was so far behind where it is today that you can't even remember how hamstringed we were by it. Don't think that going back to a time without any development team at all is going to make your projects go any faster, it would just mean that all the other projects would join them on the pile of "not going anywhere because no one's got any money to spend on them".
--HM