On 16/01/15 20:28, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:09 PM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
The 95% statistic may not be meaningful, but neither is this. The number of
users involved does not reflect the importance of the information presented any more than that a project exists at all.
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
This applies whether a project has several thousand active users building a general encyclopedia of common topics, or a team of ten working on a collection of bird names, or even one single individual putting together a chronicle of their family history. MediaWiki is a platform that empowers all of these, and to turn your back on them directly contradicts Wikimedia's overall mission.
I believe the claim is being made that many of those people with tiny one-off self-hosted projects are *not* being well-served right now by a MediaWiki instance that's out of date with security holes and no new features.
Here's where I tend to make the comparison to WordPress:
WordPress is open source and available for self-hosting (including on shared hosts with PHP and MySQL), but a lot of people find it's a pain to maintain -- even with the HUGE usability and upgrade improvements that WordPress folks have made in the last few years.
I personally maintain my own WordPress blog, and pretty much just occasionally make a security update and otherwise hardly touch it. Plenty of other people do this too, with varying degrees of success staying up to date and fixing occasional operational problems.
But lots of people also use WordPress's hosted service as well. No need to manually install security upgrades, maintain your own vhost, etc.
In our comparison, we have MediaWiki for self-hosters, and we have hosted projects for Wikimedia, but if you want a hosted wiki that's not covered in ads your choices are vague and poorly documented.
I would argue that many small projects would be better served by good wiki farm hosting than trying to maintain their own sites.
Sure, that's not for everyone -- but I think the people who are best served by running their own servers have a lot of overlap with the people who would be capable of maintaining multiple services on a virtual machine.
-- brion
Comparing it to wordpress is a false equivalence, however. There, Wordpress is both generic host and developer/maintainer, but here Wikimedia, the developer/maintainer, only hosts its own projects. Not others. No other host will be able to achieve the same scope and resources as Wikimedia, and even if what a host has is /good/, they still will not have anywhere near the same upstream clout.
And this is exactly the problem that I think many of us are objecting to. As third-party users, even when we are hosters ourselves, we have little clout, few resources, and yet somehow we are expected to stand on our own? How?
One of MediaWiki's strongest features is its flexibility, too, and that is something that wiki hosting services, even relatively good ones, often cannot effectively support due to limited scope. Even wanting fairly common things like SMW narrows options down considerably, and if you're building your own extensions in order to deal with a particular kind of data specific to your own research? Then what?
In many cases when folks run their own wikis, this is why - they either need something specific, or want to maintain some form of control over their own content/communities that isn't necessarily afforded otherwise. Otherwise, they wouldn't be bothering at all, because even as is it is considerable extra work to do this.
-I