[Foundation-l] Development tasks and project needs

[Gerard Meijssen]

Chad Perrin wrote:

>On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 12:22:00PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
>  
>
>>Sj-
>>    
>>
>>>Nonsense.  Money is an excellent resource when properly applied, but
>>>there is no fundamental reason why we should have fewer volunteer
>>>developers than Linux has, for instance.  After all, what are we
>>>writing but the kernel for our collective intelligence?
>>>      
>>>
>>An interesting comparison. However, it is worth noting that there is a  
>>billion dollar industry behind the Linux kernel, and many of its most  
>>active developers are directly employed by corporations like IBM, Novell  
>>and Red Hat. Hence, development tends to be driven by corporate interests.
>>    
>>
>
>On the other hand, there's a much lower bar for entry into working on
>projects like Wikipedia developing content, which is in plain English
>(or whatever language you're using), and even for entry into working on
>the MediaWiki software (PHP web application design is considerably less
>hairy than hacking kernel code).  Your points stand, basically, except
>that you might be underestimating the effectiveness of pure volunteerism
>in many (not all, but many) aspects of the entire Wikimedia family of
>projects.
>
>--
>Chad Perrin
>[ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
>
Hoi,
When you edit in English, it is easy to use Mediawiki, try however to 
edit something like 
http://fa.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=FarsiLes15&action=edit and you 
apreciate one reason why our Farsi and Arabic communities are so small. 
When you remove the <div class="plainlinks"> and look at the page in 
page preview in Firefox, you appreciate why this stupid external source 
indicator is another reason to for needing futher improvements. All the 
special codes are available in the Roman script. When you edit in Farsi, 
you do not have the characters available to 
[[media:en-insert.ogg|insert]] a soundfile ..

When this threat started, it pointed out that many languages and 
projects do not benefit from sorely needed developer attention. When we 
cannot rely on your underestimated volunteerism, I  hope we are not only 
able but also willing to pay our way out of obstructions like this. We 
have plenty of room to improve the usability and accessability of 
knowledge that is NOT encyclopedic based and is not in a Western 
language. This asperation is 100% in line with what the Wikimedia 
Foundations stands for.

Please apreciate that I do not think the work done by all of the 
volunteers is not great and important. My point is that it is biased and 
not effective in particular ways. I disagree with your assertion that 
the volunteerism is effective for projects other than wikipedia. I do 
think that we can redress this inequality by investing in software that 
DOES help other scripts and other projects.

Thanks,
    GerardM