[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

Thomas Morton morton.thomas at googlemail.com
Tue Sep 13 07:06:21 UTC 2011


>
> 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.
>
>
Uh oh - criticism time...

WikiLove was developed supposedly to address one of the major problems of
English Wikipedia (a problem which also affects other Wiki's to a larger or
lesser extent). It is an example of a solution being developed by those
without a full understanding of the problem (which is no criticism of the
devs involved; there is no reason they should understand the issues in
depth). It was ten deployed with minimal discussion, once again
demonstrating the lack of links between the developers and the community
(because just about anyone could have pointed out it would have been
controversial).

WMF failed it's role in several critical ways there.

And it a wider one too; because it seems to me there are more critical
technical issues in smaller projects that are not being fixed or addressed
or supported. And instead things like WikiLove appear.... feels like a bad
application of resources.

Just my view; but I think that the idea that sister projects do not get the
developer support they need is a fair assessment.

Tom


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