[Foundation-l] Regarding the one million dollar usability grant and already extant but unused extensions

[Erik Moeller]

2008/12/5 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> Thank you Erik!
> But I do not believe the potential scope of these two extensions has been
> appropriately realized by the powers that be, otherwise the technologies
> would have been put to a large scale trial sooner.

Up until July 2008, the paid technology team of the Wikimedia
Foundation consisted of four people who were responsible for software
development, operations management, and office IT support. So, the
"powers that be" have been pretty busy. :-) I agree these extensions
are very powerful; it's wonderful that they were developed
independently, and there are quite a few successful use cases out
there already to learn from.

We'll have to figure out what their role can be within a specific
restricted grant to help first-time authors. If we can't make
significant progress on assessing the more advanced features offered
by SMW/SMF, we'll certainly target that as a future goal.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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