Happy-melon wrote:
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.
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Are you trying to argue that the other projects get anywhere near as much attention as Wikipedia?
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.
I considered the venue before posting. But the reality is that the tech side (or specifically MediaWiki) is currently at the core of every Wikimedia wiki. Its development, its features, its architecture, etc. all have a fundamental impact on what any Wikimedia site is.
The focus of MediaWiki should mirror the focus of the Wikimedia Foundation. Currently MediaWiki tries to do too much, tries to fill too many niches, and ends up not doing very much particularly well. I'd like to see that change. I'd like to see it focused, as I think it would benefit both MediaWiki and the Wikimedia Foundation to a huge extent. If you think that's a topic for foundation-l, I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree. Personally, I think it's a tech topic, given that nearly every change seems to at least begin with code development.
MZMcBride