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