This post is not technical, but it *is* specifically about Mediawiki.
Over the years all of us have become familiar with Jimbo's famous comment about
"a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all
knowledge",
which eventually became the official "Vision" of the Wikimedia Foundation. (See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vision.)
Over time I've thought about the software which enables that vision. Mediawiki is
extraordinary software with outstanding potential that does incredible work. Sometimes
when we focus on its current technical limitations we can lose that perspective.
Personally,
when I think back over the limitations that bothered me in the past, I realize that given
time,
each and every one them was always solved in the end, and the
functionality
has
progressed to a degree that would have been hard for any of us to imagine a few years
ago. For this I am personally grateful to all of the people who have continued to develop
Mediawiki and implement its functions on the various projects.
(Just in case anybody is wondering, I have absolutely no specific requests left that I
need
to have implemented. Everything is done and already works. This is pure gratitude. :-)
The point of my post is this: On my Wikipedia user page I have a sentence which I would
like to suggest as a software "vision" complementary to Jimbo's famous
statement. I am
surely no Jimbo, but I do think the sentences flow very nicely together and are quite
true.
I am also no programmer or developer, but I think my sentence accurately reflects what
the
work that you, the software and hardware people, do, means to those of us who use it
around the world:
Jimbo: Imagine a world in which
every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge.
Me: Mediawiki Software is the best tool in the world for collecting and organizing
human knowledge, in all of its forms and in every language.
There are more comments on my WP user page. Further thanks (on the "every
language"
aspect) go to the people at
http://translatewiki.net.
So whatever you want to call this (vision, slogan, mission statement, true
advertisement),
it is my suggestion for a simple statement of what MW is all about and why it is so
great.
Anyone want to adopt it?
Dovi