Erik Moeller wrote:
I also believe there's a better solution to the
problem of volunteer
motiviation than the one you suggest, and that is the building of group
identity from the start. This is what WikiProjects on Wikipedia do, for
example.
It's a separate issue, but I think a solution to some cases of developer
motivation would be to have good documentation and modular code so
people can work on parts that interest them. I know I personally have
had ideas I'd be willing to implement in the past, but my brief digging
led me to the conclusion that I'd basically have to read through and
understand the entire MediaWiki codebase before I could usefully add
anything to it, and at that point I decided that while I was interested,
I wasn't *that* interested. A bunch of the people proposing various
extensions and whatnot on meta seem to be in the same boat---they could
code up bits and pieces, but don't know how to hook into the larger
codebase.
Of course, this is another "plan with no implementation" --- writing the
documentation and cleaning up the code would require me to read and
understand it all first, which is exactly what I wish to avoid, as I
have other projects I'm supposed to be working on full-time. =]
-Mark