2010/9/8 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>:
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)