[WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

[David Gerard]

Tim Starling (t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au) [041119 23:27]:

> I'm sorry if I caused offence, I just wanted to impress on everyone that 
> Wikipedia has barely any developers. If you're ever wondering why some 
> feature hasn't been written yet, it's because there's been no-one around 
> to write it. Most of the active developers seem to be more interested 
> writing features for a general audience than for Wikimedia projects. 
> There's more editors on the Old English Wikipedia than there are 
> developers overall. Maybe Matt doesn't want to help, and that's fine. I 
> get the feeling Gerrit doesn't either. But is there anyone? Every second 
> Wikipedian seems to know a programming language. We just need, say, two 
> or three developers willing to put in a few hours per week.


Hmm. I am tempted to learn PHP just for my favoured features (though I
haven't written anything more complicated than a shell script with a loop
and a condition for over a decade) - as if I haven't got enough things
using my time ;-)

A suggestion: would it be worth putting an ad in the top line of the
article pages? The place where donation beg notices go. "Wikipedia needs
volunteer developers. PHP and Python. No fortune, a small amount of fame.
Your MediaWiki needs You!" With the last sentence being a link to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker .


- d.