Erik Moeller wrote:
On Don, 2003-01-30 at 05:09, Takuya Murata wrote:
Actually I am not so sure about what is more democratic system. I said the system of wikipedia should be more democratic because it seems to me that the decision about the wikipedia system doesn't reflect well the opinion among the majority of wikipedians,
Actually, the wiki code is developed in a manner very similar to wiki articles themselves. CVS access is granted fairly liberally, so almost anyone can modify the software. Like wiki, CVS stores all previous revisions, so it's always possible to revert if necessary. To avoid problems, we use a manual mechanism similar to FileCopy, in the form of Brion occasionally updating the live sever. This part could be more formalized, and probably should be eventually.
Given this, I'm surprised we don't have more active coders. Right now, it's mostly Brion, Magnus, Tomasz (TeX) and me. There are really few valid excuses not to participate, given that PHP is easy to learn and all the tools you need are free. If you have time to work on Wikipedia articles, you have time to work on Wikipedia code.
The only real difference is that you need to be a coder to participate. Since we're dealing with code, I don't think this can be much improved. Importing the code into wiki doesn't make much sense -- we should use the right tool for the right job. CVS is tried and tested and works well in this situation, so do SourceForge's tools.
When there are conflicts about features we try to resolve them either before or after the feature is introduced, depending on personal judgment. Knowing that there are *always* people who disagree about something if you ask if there are people who disagree makes it tempting to wait until someone complains *after* a feature has been added. Compare it to asking on a Talk page before making a change, or just making the change and waiting until someome complains.
But if by "democratic" you mean that the coders need to work on what the non-coders decide then, sorry, that's not gonna happen. If you want that, I have a long list of articles that I want to be written ..
It is more about what you should NOT do that we non-coders want to have influence on. (Don't add any more feautures please.) Otherwise you are playing 'Gods' over us 'normal' wikipedians. Sorry, I'm coding for more than 20 years now but I do not dare to fiddle around in codes that I don't know nor fully understand (I don't want to disturb you or the non-coding-wikipedians (99.9999%). Kind Regards, Pieter Suurmond
Regards,
Erik
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
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