Daniel-

But please lets stop supporting Wikipedia-centracism/chauvinism and work toward making MediaWiki maximally useful to all Wikimedia projects.

MediaWiki is not really within Jimbo's realm of control. It's an open source project like any other, and the authority rests with the developers, some of whom have little or nothing to do with Wikipedia at all. This might change if Jimbo directly pays Brion has lead developer of MediaWiki.

Of course Jimbo might decree against activating certain features for Wikipedia or any other project. In practice, even that decision will probably be made by Brion. ;-) All of us love Wikipedia so there's unlikely to be a major disparity of opinion.

But in spite of Jimbo's benevolent dictator position, the reality is that all our working relationships are voluntary arrangements that can be easily broken up and replaced if necessary. As a libertarian, I think Jimbo likes it that way.

I also agree that we should not be too Wikipedia-centric. Wikibooks in particular may well reach similar orders of magnitude as Wikipedia, so might Wikisource with a good policy. It is simply good planning to keep the software universal.

Regards,

Erik

Daniel Mayer wrote:

So I guess the needs of Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikisource (not to mention Wikitravel) are secondary then?

As I understood Jimbo and Brion, the priority is Wikipedia, *more or less* including the affiliated Wikimedia projects. Really *secondary* are third party projects, mirroring the Wikipedia or using the MediaWiki software for other tasks. I think, the message was, that MediaWiki is not supposed to become a second TikiWiki Groupware- Content- Management- Calendaring- And- Whatever- One- Stop- Catch-All solution.

But please lets stop supporting Wikipedia-centracism/chauvinism and work toward making MediaWiki maximally useful to all Wikimedia projects.

That's simply the way Open Source works. It's developer-centric, not user-centric; coders are rulers, because they can code; because they aren't paid, they are coding what they like to use for themselves; if they would be paid, maybe some project manager could give them tasks to code, but they aren't. In lucky cases, the interests of developers and users come together, but usually developers won't code stuff for users they don't need for themselves. People who want to have problems solved have to become coders, or just take what the developers give away. If there *are* developers using other WikiMedia projects, they *will* enhance it; if there aren't, features needed for other WikiMedia projects will *maybe* implemented sometime if a developers feels like doing so. Features needed by third party users will most probably be never implemented by the core developers. It's simply a matter of priorities.

Regards, -asb