I'd like to reopen the discussion about whether we officially consider
MediaWiki a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Currently, the
position of the Foundation on this issue appears somewhat ambiguous.
While we run the Subversion repository, the website, the mailing
lists, and pay the two lead developers, MediaWiki is listed, for
example, on:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects
not as a Wikimedia project, but as a "related project." It is also not
part of our usual list of projects. On the other hand,
mediawiki.org
carries the "A Wikimedia Project" button.
My view is that we should make this the consistent, official view and
consistently promote and list MediaWiki as a Wikimedia Foundation
project wherever other Wikimedia projects are listed. My hope is that,
in doing so, we will make MediaWiki more prominent and attract more
volunteers to work on it, just as on other Wikimedia Foundation
projects. I also believe that this will help in making MediaWiki
strategy a key part of the Foundation's general project strategy.
What are other people's thoughts? The only downside I can see is that
this might be seen as a move to exercise additional control over the
direction of development. But already, all major code changes to the
core have to be approved by Brion, who is a Foundation employee. I
actually think it will be easier to identify our responsibility
towards outside users if we consider MediaWiki to be a key part of the
free culture movement that the Wikimedia Foundation must support.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik
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