On 08/01/07, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
The notion that the MediaWiki software is almost entirely developed for one organisation is seriously wrong. OmegaWiki, formerly WiktionaryZ has realised a lot of functionality already and this is just one other project. There are many more projects that have developed on MediaWiki and much of this development, like OmegaWiki, is as Free as the WMF developed functionality is.
I stand corrected :-) Is as much of this as possible in the main line of development, or regularly merged?
As to distributed MediaWiki, as you may remember the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam (Andrew Tannenbaum's department) is actively working on a distributed Mediawiki and is particularly interested in the distributed network functionality that is required. This includes things like making sure the content is near to where it is requested.
Excellent!
The WMF could provide a meeting place for organisations that use MediaWiki stimulate cooperation. The WMF can provide a developer that has as his task to mentor new developers, particularly students from Universities that want to be technically involved in MediaWiki projects.
That's the sort of thing I mentioned. Trouble being that would take an experienced MW coder who wants to do that and can do that as well as code.
My expectation is that it will be possible to do some 50 projects in a half year (only the MW support .. not supporting the content part of the project) this is likely to lead to a retention of developers of in between five to ten percent and will as a consequence be a good investment.
Yep.
The organisations that develop MediaWiki may also need support to build extensions so that their code can be part of the main MediaWiki code. This can be a paid for service. When it is not the WMF who does this, another organisation may be willing to provide this service ... I am sure there are more things that can be done when MediaWiki has its organisational part developed it may even generate money for the Foundation.
I wonder if there's any money in MediaWiki programming consultancy as yet.
- d.