[Foundation-l] Re: Development tasks and project needs

[Michael Snow]

I'm close to being out of my depth on some of this discussion, but 
perhaps somebody would be able to explain for me. A few people have 
raised the possibility that what is technically desirable on one project 
may not be so on another.

It seems to me that in some areas, perhaps we could more explicitly 
design for different options, where some projects are better suited for 
one option and some for another. I'm reminded of the recent debate over 
nofollow attributes, where it was suggested that some larger projects 
that already fight spam effectively might choose to turn this off. Do we 
have a conscious preference for having all sites on basically the same 
software configuration? For example, could we get something like dynamic 
listing, for which I can see the usefulness on Wikinews, without 
applying the same thing to Wikipedia where it might be detrimental? Is 
this sort of thing happening already more than I'm aware of? Why would 
this not be possible within the MediaWiki framework?

For projects where consistent data structures are most helpful, like 
Wiktionary or Wikispecies, I can understand a little why the software 
needs *might* ultimately prove incompatible with Wikipedia. With respect 
to Wikinews, from my experience there I have yet to grasp why anything 
resembling a software fork would be necessary.

Since I'm not familiar with all the details here, maybe these are just 
dumb questions. But looking at things only from a distance, the picture 
I see makes me want to ask anyway.

--Michael Snow