[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Erik Moeller]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:24 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> The current reality is that nearly any
> project besides the English Wikipedia has almost no technical support.

That's a misunderstanding of what's happening.

I would characterize WMF's prioritization as an "A rising tide lifts
all boats" policy. Improvements are generally conceived to be widely
usable, both in Wikimedia projects and even outside the Wikimedia
environment, and to have the largest possible impact. Even if a first
deployment is Wikipedia, they will generally benefit other projects as
well.

But let's take other completed extensions as examples.

1) WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew,
Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the
respective project communities.

2) ArticleFeedback has been enabled on Hungarian Wikipedia, Portuguese
Wikibooks, and Hindi Wikipedia. (Wikinews, BTW, still runs the
predecessor ReaderFeedback extension.)

3) Narayam (an extension to support Indic languages) has been enabled
on Malayam Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikisource and Wikipedia,
Tamil Wikibooks and Wikisource, and Sanskrit Wikipedia, Wikibooks,
Wikisource, and Wiktionary.

MoodBar will be made more widely available as it matures. And so on
and so forth.

It's true that English Wikipedia often (not always) serves as a
staging ground for new features, but that's an entirely different
matter and doesn't negate the intent of achieving maximum
cross-project/cross-site impact with the work we do.

It's also not true that Commons development has anything to do with
grant money. WMF received a one-time grant for Commons-related
development, but all recent development has been funded from WMF's
operating budget, and it's part of our standard roadmap -- for the
simple reason that investing in Commons serves all our projects and
increases our impact world-wide. And that's, of course, why we sought
the grant in the first place, not the other way around.

It is true that projects like Wikinews and Wiktionary, to fully
succeed (if success is possible), almost certainly require more
specialized product development and devotion in addition to the
general development work that benefits all projects.

It's my own view that specialized development is best-served by
ensuring that we give the global community great spaces to innovate
and create new things. We've put quite a bit of development effort
recently into improving MediaWiki's support for gadgets, and we're
also working on the Wikimedia Labs project to this end (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs ). WMF's role for
specialized improvements should ideally be to review and deploy code
that's ready to serve a well-identified purpose and that doesn't have
harmful side-effects.  Where we haven't don't do so in a timely and
reasonable fashion, we must strive to do better.

-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate