[Foundation-l] Development tasks and project needs (was: Positive discrimination related to smaller communities and projects)

[Erik Moeller]

I am not aware of any serious discussions concerning a fork. DV suggested  
that video files might be best hosted on some external service, but I  
commented that Wikimedia has more than enough resources to do that, and  
that we mostly need to agree on which politically correct video codec to  
use. I strongly oppose both project and software forks for reasons that  
should be obvious.

It is true that Wikinews is reaching the limits of human scaling. This is  
because we're getting so large that we will soon have to stop listing all  
stories on the Main Page, and will have to use separate index pages  
instead.

When Wikinews started, I did set up such index pages for regions and  
topics. It already became clear during the demo phase that these are  
nearly impossible to maintain manually -- it's not a fun job, so it  
doesn't get done, especially because everyone with some small technical  
knowledge knows that a computer could do this.

So, what's the solution?

Since I'm the person Gerard spoke about who is going to implement  
structured data functionality over the next 3-4 months, my own resources  
are limited. However, I have offered in the past to act as a development  
task coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation, and that offer still  
stands.

Such a task coordinator would prioritize tasks, maintain contacts to  
potentially interested sponsors, and make recommendations on spending a  
certain part of our internal budget on development tasks. He would write  
the basic specifications, try to locate interested developers (both by  
inviting them directly, and by having public calls for tenders), watch  
over the implementation, and decide whether it meets the specs (together  
with the Board and the MediaWiki Release Manager, Brion Vibber).

His Holiness JW III is not infinitely scalable. I believe I am well- 
qualified for the role in question, and it is something I would love to  
do. The WMF has hired Brion on a part-time basis. But that's not going to  
cut it. Brion has got his hands full making sure that all the crazy  
inventions by people like me actually work, fixing existing bugs, working  
on sponsor-specific tasks like OAI support for GuruNet, churning out  
releases, watching over scalability, and addressing high priority general  
project issues like single login.

I strongly believe that a combined model of full-time employment for  
people like Brion, and task-based contracts for project-specific needs, is  
the only way forward.

As for the specific needs Wikinews has, Ilya has already written a bit  
about that. I have a fairly good idea in my head how news feeds could work  
within MediaWiki in a scalable fashion. The question is, are we willing to  
spend the money to get this done?

And Wikinews is not the only project which needs changes. Wikipedia,  
Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikispecies, Wikiquote, and very  
importantly, Wikicommons, would all benefit greatly from certain added  
functionality. Whenever I go to a meetup, I hear from a dozen people about  
all the new features which we need to make their projects, or projects  
within a project, work. Often these ideas are really bad. That's why there  
needs to be a gatekeeper process by which good ones are selected for  
implementation.

Just because Wikipedia sort of works (even though we still don't have peer  
review functionality after more than 4 years), we shouldn't start  
slacking. We have half a dozen active developers at any given time. We  
have hundreds of thousands of users and even more readers. We've tried  
recruiting. Jimbo has given his speech at FOSDEM. There's more we can do,  
but in part due to the growing complexity of MediaWiki, this imbalance can  
ultimately only be addressed with one resource: money.

Regards,

Erik