Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
On 08/27/2012 12:04 AM, Daniel Friesen wrote:
We need some sort of think tank (well some thing with a better name) non-profit that people donate to. To have it hire people to crank out MediaWiki features outside of just the stuff WMF wants.
I'd love to spend 80% of my time cranking out fringe MediaWiki features where what the community wants and what my specialties are intersect.
To borrow from the great Amir: +[[Crore]]
Yes, what the world needs is another horribly confusingly named foundation. After we establish the MediaWiki Foundation, we can start work on the MikiWedia Foundation and the WediaMiki Foundation. ;-)
In all seriousness, this has come up a few times before (on wikitech-l and mediawiki-l, I believe) and it deserves thoughtful consideration. I think the first step is to write a draft somewhere on MediaWiki.org detailing:
* what you view as the current deficiencies of the Wikimedia Foundation owning/operating MediaWiki; and
* what possible problems might be solved (or created!) by the establishment of a MediaWiki Foundation.
A discussion of some analogous organizations (such as Mozilla) might be good as case studies to include in such a page as well.
MZMcBride