David Gerard schreef:
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?
OmegaWiki makes use of the MediaWiki SVN. The code is therefore first
entered in SVN before it is applied to our environments. (Yes, we have
some test environments, and one production environment). The software is
in its own SVN branch. I understand that the software will be merged
with the cutting edge release as used by the WMF but you have to ask
Erik about the precise details.
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.
Well, this is an investment. First you invest, then you profit. It takes
money to realise this. The profit is in the expanded base of coders.
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.
ABSOLUTELY .. There are regularly tasks that need coding .. Experienced
developers have a distinct advantage. For OmegaWiki we have introduced
several people both professionals and "amateur" developers into the
vagaries of both MediaWiki and Relational MediaWiki. I can tell you that
we have sunk substantial amounts of money in the development of
OmegaWiki and this is likely to continue.
We also have several students who have a place for their thesis who will
be working on content related technology. We are working with the
University of Bamberg on a project to internationalise educational
content that will use data from OmegaWiki. This will also require some
software and that is in their budget as software development. The point
here is that as we are willing to cooperate and acknowledge our
partnering, we are able to realise OmegaWiki in a way that is not really
open to the WMF projects because of the way organisations like Virgin
Unite are treated.
By the way, there is a growing demand for admins for MediaWiki projects.
In the Netherlands there are at least two people I know off doing admin
work professionally. It is a GOOD thing because it makes MediaWiki and
Wikis acceptable and known by a substantially large and influential
group of people.
Thanks,
GerardM
PS We have regularly a need for more developers...