2010/9/8 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
This is something that's been a problem for years now.
I do not think there is any sort of deliberate intent. However, keeping the data close is a way to proprietise a wiki even if it's free content, so making it easy to fork is an important attitude to maintain.
I realise this is difficult when the devs have to work as hard as possible just to keep everything from falling over ...
That's right, there is no deliberate intent and it's really a lack of people on the ops side (dumps are an ops thing, not a dev thing, and devs generally can't do much to help here). WMF is also not "ignoring" requests to provide image dumps, it just hasn't gotten around to setting them up yet; presumably, this is because text dumps aren't running smoothly yet (I'd appreciate a reply from Ariel Glenn to get the facts here, but since Ariel is out of the country I may or may not get my wish).
It's true that the dumps situation is still a problem, but you (OP) should assume some good faith here rather than accusing the WMF of ignoring you, not earning the community's trust or even trying to usurp Wikipedia. You're right, you are being paranoid.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)