On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:24 PM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: > The current reality is that nearly any > project besides the English Wikipedia has almost no technical support.
That's a misunderstanding of what's happening. I would characterize WMF's prioritization as an "A rising tide lifts all boats" policy. Improvements are generally conceived to be widely usable, both in Wikimedia projects and even outside the Wikimedia environment, and to have the largest possible impact. Even if a first deployment is Wikipedia, they will generally benefit other projects as well. But let's take other completed extensions as examples. 1) WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the respective project communities. 2) ArticleFeedback has been enabled on Hungarian Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, and Hindi Wikipedia. (Wikinews, BTW, still runs the predecessor ReaderFeedback extension.) 3) Narayam (an extension to support Indic languages) has been enabled on Malayam Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikisource and Wikipedia, Tamil Wikibooks and Wikisource, and Sanskrit Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, and Wiktionary. MoodBar will be made more widely available as it matures. And so on and so forth. It's true that English Wikipedia often (not always) serves as a staging ground for new features, but that's an entirely different matter and doesn't negate the intent of achieving maximum cross-project/cross-site impact with the work we do. It's also not true that Commons development has anything to do with grant money. WMF received a one-time grant for Commons-related development, but all recent development has been funded from WMF's operating budget, and it's part of our standard roadmap -- for the simple reason that investing in Commons serves all our projects and increases our impact world-wide. And that's, of course, why we sought the grant in the first place, not the other way around. It is true that projects like Wikinews and Wiktionary, to fully succeed (if success is possible), almost certainly require more specialized product development and devotion in addition to the general development work that benefits all projects. It's my own view that specialized development is best-served by ensuring that we give the global community great spaces to innovate and create new things. We've put quite a bit of development effort recently into improving MediaWiki's support for gadgets, and we're also working on the Wikimedia Labs project to this end ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs ). WMF's role for specialized improvements should ideally be to review and deploy code that's ready to serve a well-identified purpose and that doesn't have harmful side-effects. Where we haven't don't do so in a timely and reasonable fashion, we must strive to do better. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
