On 08/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The notion that the MediaWiki software is almost
entirely developed for
one organisation is seriously wrong. OmegaWiki, formerly WiktionaryZ has
realised a lot of functionality already and this is just one other
project. There are many more projects that have developed on MediaWiki
and much of this development, like OmegaWiki, is as Free as the WMF
developed functionality is.
I stand corrected :-) Is as much of this as possible in the main line
of development, or regularly merged?
As to distributed MediaWiki, as you may remember the
Vrije Universiteit
of Amsterdam (Andrew Tannenbaum's department) is actively working on a
distributed Mediawiki and is particularly interested in the distributed
network functionality that is required. This includes things like making
sure the content is near to where it is requested.
Excellent!
The WMF could provide a meeting place for
organisations that use
MediaWiki stimulate cooperation. The WMF can provide a developer that
has as his task to mentor new developers, particularly students from
Universities that want to be technically involved in MediaWiki
projects.
That's the sort of thing I mentioned. Trouble being that would take an
experienced MW coder who wants to do that and can do that as well as
code.
My expectation is that it will be possible to do some
50
projects in a half year (only the MW support .. not supporting the
content part of the project) this is likely to lead to a retention of
developers of in between five to ten percent and will as a consequence
be a good investment.
Yep.
The organisations that develop MediaWiki may also
need support to build extensions so that their code can be part of the
main MediaWiki code. This can be a paid for service. When it is not the
WMF who does this, another organisation may be willing to provide this
service ...
I am sure there are more things that can be done when MediaWiki has its
organisational part developed it may even generate money for the Foundation.
I wonder if there's any money in MediaWiki programming consultancy as yet.
- d.