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

[Domas Mituzas]

Hello Brian,

thanks for all  your insights, bashing and vocal support of your pet  
ideas.

I understand, that SMW is academically interesting concept (though  
there're contradicting ideas in academia too, suggesting natural  
language processing as an alternative, and this seems where currently  
research tries to go too), and it provides "usability" in niche cases  
(academic data crunching).

I fail to see why you associate SMW with general usability we're  
trying to think about? Is that something we simple mortals cannot  
understand, or are you simply out of touch from reality?

See, our project is special.

a) We have mass collaboration at large
b) We end up having mass collaboration on individual articles and topics
c) We have mega-mass readership
d) We have massive scope and depth

And, oh well, we have to run software development to facilitate all  
that. As you may notice, the above list puts quite some huge  
constraints on what we can do.
All our features end up being incremental, and even though in theory  
they are easy to revert, it is the mass collaboration that picks it up  
and moves to a stage where it is not that easy (and that happens  
everywhere, where lots of work is being done).

So, you are attacking templates, which have helped to deal with nearly  
everything we do (and are tiny, compared to overall content they  
facilitate), and were part of incremental development of the site and  
where editing community was going. Of course, there are ways to make  
some of our template management way better (template catalogues, more  
visual editing of parameters, less special characters for casual  
editors), but they generally are how we imagine and do information  
management.

Now, if you want to come up with academic attitudes, and start telling  
how ontology is important, and all the semantic meanings have to be  
highlighted, sure, go on, talk to community, they can do it without  
software support too - by normalizing templates, using templates for  
tagging relations, then use various external tools to build  
information overlays on top of that.  Make us believe stuff like that  
has to be deployed by showing initiative in the communities, not by  
showing initiative by external parties.

Once it comes to actual software engineering, we have quite limited  
resources, and quite important mandate and cause.
We have to make sure, that readers will be able to read, editors will  
be able to edit, and foundation will still be able to support the  
project.
We may not always try to be exceptionally perfect (Tim does ;-), but  
that is because we do not want to be too stressed either.

So, when it comes to reader community, software is doing work for  
them. Some of readers end up engineering software to make it better.
When it comes to editing community, software does the work for them.  
Some of editors end up engineering software to make it better.

Which community are you talking about?

BR,
-- 
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]