Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 11:05 -0500, Edward Z. Yang
wrote:
Surely there are other features one could be
working on.
Although I'm not saying that any feature that won't be used
in the Wikipedia project is useless, I think that we should
definitely prioritize.
Fortunately we have Brion for that :-) Seriously, though,
different people have different talents and concerns, and not
everyone is best used in the same way. There are lots of
programmers and sysadmins better better than me who can keep
things running, but I've always had my eye on the long term.
A project like ours needs vision as much as it needs code.
For the luddites among us the ways of the developers are mysterious.
Brion has always been quick to answer technical concerns, even if it's
just to say, "Your idea is impossible." A luddite needs to accept such
an answer when faced with the even less desirable alternative of
learning something. Brion communicates well, but when he is the only
one doing it one quickly gets the misimpression that we have a one-man
development staff. Communication with the masses is important, and if
there were more doing it perhaps the suggestion of a fork that has come
from Wikinews would not be happening.
There has been much talk about XML, but it would be sheer pretence to
suggest that I understand.any of it. Nevertheless I will presume to
speak as democratically unelected representative of the luddites. Many
of us are happy to carry on with our familiar wiki markup and feel a
great sense of unease with the kind of rampant innovationism that has
recently been characterized by the use of templates. The question that
this boils down to is, "How will adopting XML affect the average user?"
Ec