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

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> 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.

Yep. Such as pages devoted to news in particular nations. We could register
wikinews.us, for example, and redirect it to the U.S. news page on the English
Wikinews. If and when other Wikinews' U.S. news pages get busy enough, then we
could have xx.wikinews.us redirects as well. But wikinews.us by itself should
still auto redirect to the English version (and wikinews.ru should always
prefer the Russian Wikinews even if other xx.wikinews.ru redirects exist, ect
for each nation/primary language spoken in that nation).

> 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.

For what it is worth you have my support. :) 
 
> 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).

Sounds more like a Chief Technical Officer to me. If we can't pay you to do
this, then you might as well have a nice title to put on your resume. :) That
would not prevent us from finding a way to pay you in the future for this (if
the board so wishes), nor should it prevent you from working on and getting
paid for development tasks approved by the board in the interim. 
 
> 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.

Nod. We certainly have enough money for a couple full time employees and a few
limited term mini contract positions without putting a significant dent in the
overall budget. Whether or not the board wants to do that is a policy matter
for them to decide. 
 
> 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?

We have $20,000 budgeted for development projects and/or extra hardware this
quarter. 
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005

What we need is somebody to coordinate spending priorities and have that
approved by the board. A good deal of justification will be needed to spend
money on anything other than hardware so this is not a trivial task. 

> 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.

I've also noticed some fairly obvious vandalism slipping through for days
before being corrected. Our old way of RC patrol is not scaling well by not
letting different users divide the workload. 

If I trust a set of users, then why would I need to check a diff they already
checked? And why would their edits show up just as prominently as people I
don't know/trust? Right now there is no way for me to know that somebody I
trust (or trust by proxy) has checked any particular diff. So I either check it
again or miss it in the flood of 20 to 30 edits a minute we get on the English
Wikipedia. 

-- mav


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/