[Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?

[Chad]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

> Why are so few community-developed mediawiki extensions used by the
> Foundation?
>

Are people asking for them? Are there bugs open asking for review?
Are there problems with the current code? Does it scale to WMF level?
Things like this need answering. We can't just go enable 360+ extensions
in SVN (and heaven knows how many more floating around the internet)
site-wide without careful consideration.


>
> Why do developers have such priviledged access to the source code, and the
> community such little input?
>

Because allowing the software to be edited on wiki would make a
nightmare to review and would delay scap by weeks on end. As pointed
out by several other people, Brion and Tim are pretty liberal with giving
out commit access. Pretty much just earn the trust of your fellow
developers, hang around #mediawiki, submit patches, that sort of thing.
Just as enwiki, commons, frwikisource all have their respective
communities, MediaWiki has its own :) It's all about getting involved.


> Why must the community 'vote' on extensions such as Semantic MediaWiki, and
> yet the developers can implement any feature they like, any way they like
> it?
>

As a general rule of thumb, the "votes" in bugzilla are largely ignored,
so "voting" for bugs isn't really helping anyone. However, before things
are implemented on wikis, the core developers (those who will enable
your extension) want to make sure there's a consensus for it. Just
respecting the wiki principles by which we work.

I also take argument with your second statement, that developers can
implement anything they like and get away with it. This is most certainly
not true. Ask any non-core developer how many times Brion or Tim has
reverted their changes, and I'm sure most of us will raise at least one
hand.


> Why does the Foundation need 1 million for usability when amazing tools
> continue to be ignored and untested?
>

I believe Erik (and others?) have said that reviewing existing tools is a
goal for this grant. No point in reinventing the wheel if we don't need to
(unless the wheel is a square shape, in which case it might need some
fixing :)


> Why has the Foundation gone ahead and approved the hire of several
> employees
> for usability design, when the community has had almost zero input into
> what
> that design should be?
>

Because perhaps they want to start making progress, rather than spending
a year debating it and making no solid progress. There are _known_ issues
with MediaWiki's usability, and part of this new team's job is to collect
all the
known issues, identify more, and begin fixing them. I don't see how a debate
on foundation-l (or elsewhere) will help them in this goal.

Why is this tool not being tested on Wikipedia, right now?
>
> http://wiki.ontoprise.com/ontoprisewiki/index.php/Image:Advanced_ontology_browser.gif


I go back to my first question: has anyone asked for it?

I think your original post sets forth an incorrect assumption. "Why is the
software out of the reach of the community?" It most certainly is not, as
anyone is welcome to join in and pitch their $0.02. However, we're not
going to go around and advertise a debate on all the wiki village pumps
about some new feature. Experience has shown us that if the wikis do
not agree with a particular change, they make sure to let us know in
no uncertain terms :)

-Chad