[Foundation-l] Re: Positive discrimination related to smaller communities and projects

[Brion Vibber]

Amgine wrote:
> In wikinews there has been an ongoing discussion regarding the
> unresponsiveness of the mediawiki team to issues considered critical to
> the project. This has now become a discussion regarding a fork of both
> hardware and software, and contributors are actively working toward
> doing so. I don't think this is the best choice, but it is beginning to
> look like the only choice.

Sites like Wiktionary or Wikinews are not really suitable for a wiki to
begin with. I think it's unfortunate that people have so casually thrown
"Wiki" on the front of the name and slapped up a new project wiki
without any actual plan for making it work.

Wikipedia is *very well* suited to a wiki model because an encyclopedia
is largely unstructured prose text, with cross-references between
articles and some light indexing. That's exactly what a wiki is, and our
wiki software is strongly geared to that.

Wiktionary requires structured data which is *completely* unlike what
the wiki model provides. The project's been limping along with
unstructured text for years and is going to have a hard time converting
all that when the appropriate software is finally written for it (a
project which is soon to get underway, I'm told, with a grant for
development which Erik Moeller will be working on).

Wikinews similarly has special needs which are simply outside the scope
of something like MediaWiki, with a much more limited content model,
organization, categorized feeds, much stronger requirements for
verification and moderation etc.

If the Wikinewsies would like to write and maintain suitable software
for their project, I for one think that's *great* and applaud them for
being willing to step up and put in the work instead of assuming someone
else will do it for them. The wiki spirit is all about being able to do
things yourself, after all!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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