On 01/25/2016 03:16 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
In the short-term, I believe a non-Wikimedia focused subgroup of ArchCom may make sense. The declining MediaWiki use outside of Wikimedia has been a longstanding problem for us, but not the biggest problem.
Are there stats that show a decline? Just curious.
ArchCom's focus is (and should continue to be) the needs of Wikimedia.
Disagree, though if that is what ArchCom sees its role as, then we should make a separate committee that considers the overall roadmap of MW.
Yes, I used the word "fork". I believe Wikimedia Foundation would love it if MediaWiki forked, and we were "forced" to switch to the fork. There are other projects (e.g. gcc, KHTML/WebKit, Inkscape) that were helped by a fork.
This is very true, and these are good examples.
I'm a huge supporter of the right to fork, and if someone thinks that's the best solution, they should do it.
However, there are other examples where governance has successfully changed without a fork, such as Apache Cassandra.
There are also other examples of where there's a major user of the software (e.g. Wordpress.com) with downstream customizations, but powered by open source software also used by others (Wordpress proper).
As it stands, Wikimedia Foundation is the only trusted upstream for the MediaWiki codebase. I believe WMF should jealously guard the "MediaWiki" trademark, if for no other reason than to force someone to come up with a different name. "MediaWiki" and "Wikimedia" are too similar, and there are not good reasons for us to license that trademark to anyone else.
I disagree. There are a lot of kinds of knowledge, and a lot of ways to "freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Some of those ways are consistent with being part of a Wikimedia project (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc.).
Some other kinds of knowledge sharing could make good use of MediaWiki but *don't* belong on a Wikimedia project.
Licensing the MediaWiki trademark (maybe for a limited time at first, to make sure the other organization didn't mess it up) is consistent with the vision.
- Trusted architects with clear vision and leadership
Yes, and obviously this would include WMF employees, but not exclusively (in fact ArchCom already isn't only WMF).
- A governance structure that allows WMF to operate as a worthy peer
+1
So: forks welcome! Any takers?
None of this requires a fork.
(It also might turn out that we try this, it doesn't work, and it leads to a fork. But maybe that would mean it's the right solution after all. I think we should try it without a fork first, though.)
Matt Flaschen