[Foundation-l] Re: Information flow

Mon Aug 22 18:13:18 UTC 2005

Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> 
> 
>>There was a discussion in August 2004 about implementing a bounty system
>>for MediaWiki development. Anthere ran a survey in july 2004 among
>>developers and published results on meta on August 25th 2004:
>>
>>  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_payment_poll/results
> 
> 
> A bounty system assumes someone (unpaid? community vote? donator 
> decides?) can define the tasks and assign the bounties. One 
> question in Anthere's poll was "Which tasks, if any, really ought 
> to be done, but currently are not?".  That method of design can 
> only result in a bazaar.  To build a cathedral you need an 
> architect with somewhat dictatorial powers, and the authority and 
> salary for an architect is the least likely outcome of a bounty 
> system.  For example, what if there is a $2000 bounty for adding 
> complex graphics and another $2000 bounty for improving 
> performance?  These bounties are in conflict.  Who is to decide? 
> Eric Raymond thinks bazaars are better than cathedrals because of 
> this lack of authority, but not everyone agrees with Eric Raymond. 
> For example, Linus Torvalds' architectural control over the Linux 
> kernel is a good example of dictatorial powers at their best.

Uh, no. I think you are mistaking.
In the case of my poll, it was quite simple who would make the final 
decision of which tasks really ought to be done. The one paying. In this 
case the Foundation. Which would make that decision depending on 
feedback from the community AND the developers.
So, it makes sense to ask the developers what they think, because they 
are the first ones to be able to tell us "yeah, the community wants 
that, but it is horribly difficult to do" or "yeah, but it is so boring 
no one will do it even for money" or "yeah, great stuff, very important".

This said. *I* did not make a proposal for a bounty system. I was 
frankly neutral on this solution, if not having doubts on its 
workability. Erik proposed the bounty system (though it had another 
better name which I forgot).
I made that poll for several reasons, one of which was per respect of Erik.

> Wikipedia has been extremely successful despite (not because) the 
> lack of a technical architect, especially in the last two years. 
> Some people ask how the Swedish Wikipedia can be the 5th biggest 
> with a language spoken by only 9 million people.  One strong 
> reason is that the Swedish wiki community enjoyed sub-second 
> response times at susning.nu in 2002 and 2003, while Wikipedia's 
> utter sluggishness during software phase II and III scared away 
> thousands of volunteers.  After susning.nu closed, this community 
> has moved over to the Swedish Wikipedia.  Just imagine if 
> Wikipedia had performed like that in every language.  And once 
> again, I do this only to promote Swedish language among Germans: 
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-July/017624.html
> 
> While I appreciate Anthere's outreach, the board should not ask 
> the developers which features need to be implemented.  The board 
> should promote growth of free contents (e.g. more encyclopedia 
> articles, more dictionary definitions, more photos, etc.) and 
> investigate why some sectors are growing slower than others.  If 
> there are technical bottlenecks, such as slow response times or 
> lacking features, the developers should be informed and asked (and 
> perhaps paid) to help the situation.  The goal is never technical 
> features, but the quicker generation of more contents. This is 
> just like any commercial company where the board monitors 
> customers and sales, except that the Wikimedia Foundation is not a 
> profit-optimizing organization but a free-content-optimizing one.
> 
> So don't ask why the Swedish Wikipedia is growing so fast, ask why 
> all the others grow so slowly.  We can do better than this.

The board monitors customers, which are both editors and developers, 
because developers are also customers :-)

Hmmm, on another note. Some "developments" were paid by other 
organizations, without these developments being necessarily widely 
requested by the community. But this is liberty. Why would we prevent 
another organization to pay for the development of certain features ????

What is your opinion on that ?