Hoi, The notion that the MediaWiki software is almost entirely developed for one organisation is seriously wrong. OmegaWiki, formerly WiktionaryZ has realised a lot of functionality already and this is just one other project. There are many more projects that have developed on MediaWiki and much of this development, like OmegaWiki, is as Free as the WMF developed functionality is.
As to distributed MediaWiki, as you may remember the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam (Andrew Tannenbaum's department) is actively working on a distributed Mediawiki and is particularly interested in the distributed network functionality that is required. This includes things like making sure the content is near to where it is requested.
The WMF could provide a meeting place for organisations that use MediaWiki stimulate cooperation. The WMF can provide a developer that has as his task to mentor new developers, particularly students from Universities that want to be technically involved in MediaWiki projects. My expectation is that it will be possible to do some 50 projects in a half year (only the MW support .. not supporting the content part of the project) this is likely to lead to a retention of developers of in between five to ten percent and will as a consequence be a good investment. The organisations that develop MediaWiki may also need support to build extensions so that their code can be part of the main MediaWiki code. This can be a paid for service. When it is not the WMF who does this, another organisation may be willing to provide this service ...
I am sure there are more things that can be done when MediaWiki has its organisational part developed it may even generate money for the Foundation.
Thanks, GerardM
David Gerard schreef:
On 08/01/07, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Nobody can deny the close relationship between Wikimedia and MediaWiki. Some might worry about Wikimedia taking control of MediaWiki,
Well, that's pretty much the de facto condition - it's software written and actively developed almost entirely for one organisation, that just happens to be open source and useful to lots of other people.
OTOH, it's only good sense that getting outside users involved in development will make for a better and more robust application. Actively recruiting outside developers doing interesting stuff will mean the weird and wonderful ideas can go in as extensions rather than being separate forks.
(Remember the chitchat about "distributed MediaWiki"? Seen http://www.wikileaks.org/ ? I've already written a note to one of the devs strongly suggesting they participate in the mainstream of MediaWiki development.)
[Mind you, I was sure this would be the case with Slash, which is of industrial robustness ... but an exercise in pain to sysadmin. I want to hurt it. Real bad. In the face.]
So the question becomes: What would or could Wikimedia being the official (not just de facto) organisational umbrella do to or for MediaWiki? Assuming things aren't actually broken right now, which it appears from this thread is the case.
- Legal backup in case of attacks from the querulous? Lots of
prominent free software has a legal backup these days. Though most of the legal concern for Wikimedia is our content.
- Too many eggs in one basket
- Express task of recruiting outside devs
- ... who then have to be herded by current devs
Please add more.
which is amusing considering the amount of influence MediaWiki developers have over Wikimedia affairs. They have as much to fear from us as we do from them ;)
The cure for en:wp admin politics is to point out the devs have all the REAL power ;-D
- d.