"MZMcBride" z@mzmcbride.com wrote in message news:C9BBCF19.1056A%z@mzmcbride.com...
Ryan Kaldari wrote:
Yeah, the local CSS/JS cruft is definitely a problem. I've tried doing clean-up on a few wikis, but I usually just get chewed out by the local admins for not discussing every change in detail (which obviously doesn't scale for fixing 200+ wikis). I would love to hear ideas for how to address this problem.
This caught my eye as Wikimedia has far more than 200 wikis. There seems to be a shift happening within the Wikimedia Foundation. The sister projects have routinely been ignored in the past, but things seem to be going further lately....
Personally, I'm in favor of disbanding all of the projects that Wikimedia has no intention of actively supporting in the near-future or even mid-range future. I think the current situation in which certain sister projects are supported in name only is unacceptable to the users and to the public.
MZMcBride
I would be very interested to hear what criterion you would use to separate out a group of 200 (or any number other than zero, one or all [1]) wikis which are "maintained" from the rest which are "unmaintained"; where the distinction in quality of service, the ratio of Foundation resources to userbase or readership, or any other meaningful statistic, showed any obvious jump across the boundary. You would need to be able to show such a thing in order to make anyone believe that there is any "intention" (or lack thereof) for the Foundation to do anything with the sister projects.
It's one thing to argue that more of the Foundation's resources should be directed to particular projects; that's a perfectly reasonable discussion, but for foundation-l, not here. It's quite another to argue that an arbitrary number (don't forget that Ryan is referring to the number of wikis with broken JavaScript which are unable to fix it themselves, not any attempt to count every wiki in the cluster) represents some freudian slip into some diabolical scheme or even into a subconscious mindset. Even if that is what you want to claim, that belongs in foundation-l as well. "Our shell request workflow could use work" is a time-honoured topic which comes and goes and seems to be in a relatively successful era at the moment. Anything more political than that has nothing to do with, and no place on, wikitech-l.
--HM