Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 11:05 -0500, Edward Z. Yang wrote:
Surely there are other features one could be working on. Although I'm not saying that any feature that won't be used in the Wikipedia project is useless, I think that we should definitely prioritize.
Fortunately we have Brion for that :-) Seriously, though, different people have different talents and concerns, and not everyone is best used in the same way. There are lots of programmers and sysadmins better better than me who can keep things running, but I've always had my eye on the long term. A project like ours needs vision as much as it needs code.
For the luddites among us the ways of the developers are mysterious. Brion has always been quick to answer technical concerns, even if it's just to say, "Your idea is impossible." A luddite needs to accept such an answer when faced with the even less desirable alternative of learning something. Brion communicates well, but when he is the only one doing it one quickly gets the misimpression that we have a one-man development staff. Communication with the masses is important, and if there were more doing it perhaps the suggestion of a fork that has come from Wikinews would not be happening.
There has been much talk about XML, but it would be sheer pretence to suggest that I understand.any of it. Nevertheless I will presume to speak as democratically unelected representative of the luddites. Many of us are happy to carry on with our familiar wiki markup and feel a great sense of unease with the kind of rampant innovationism that has recently been characterized by the use of templates. The question that this boils down to is, "How will adopting XML affect the average user?"
Ec