On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Under the redesigned grants scheme, WMF Project grants might be able to help with this kind of software development work for Commons and/or Wikisource. I happen to know a developer here in Cascadia who might be interested, either as an individual or in association with a Wikimedia affiliate, in doing this kind of work on a grant or contract basis.
Pinging Kacie for comment about possible grant funding. (:
Hi Pine, thanks for the comment. I understand what you mean, and I do believe there is space to work on Wikisource via grants, BUT.
But I already did a Individual Engagement Grant in 2013 (with David Cuenca) regarding Wikisource. It was great, but IEGs don't give you staff time. So me and David used Google Summer of Code, and we mentored 4 projects: if I'm not mistaken, only one was really finished, meaning it produced concrete results on Wikisource. Others stopped before (for example, two dedicated mediawiki extensions were not put in production). Within the IEG, we made a big survey among Wikisource communities, to develop a wishlist and a roadmap for WS communities. We set up a Wikisource Community User Group. We talked and talked. Bugs were and are reported, from years. Two weeks ago, we convened the very first internationl Wikisource conference, in Vienna, hosted by Wikimedia Austria (3 members from WMF were there, and we had a great and productive time, reports will follow).
I've personally been involved in all of these efforts, so I've also seen that real impact of Wikisource infrastructure (core WS extension, design, interface, performance, development) has been minimal. I don't really want to have this conversation here and now, but I have had a fair amount of experience in this to say that until the WMF (or some affiliate big enough and high enough in the software pipeline) commit to WS, change won't magically happen by itself. We have practically one real volunteer developer, and he's full of work to do (also, I already asked him if he would like to receive a grant to work on certain issues, and he can't, and he's the only one who could do that, thanks to his unique experience).
Grant works for little things, I'm afraid. Major change requires something else.
Aubrey