Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
> Bug #189 is, as far as I can tell, a request to make machine-readable
> musical notation available on the WMF cluster. To do this, we need
> developers to get interested in Lilypond or ABC enough to help us deploy
> the extensions.
>
> By providing a sandbox that is being actively used, I hope to get some
> developers interested -- to show a community that is using their work.
> Hopefully we could transfer that work to the WMF cluster after
> development on the extension is completed.
>
> If you have a better idea for taking something that has set dead of
> almost 3 years and injecting new life into it -- something more than
> back-n-forth on the bug or this mailing list -- I'd love to hear it.
Sure. I think we agree on the underlying issue: a lack of interest by
outside groups (for free). But that doesn't always need to be met by a PR
campaign (though perhaps making this a coding challenge is an avenue to
explore). There's plenty of money in Wikimedia's operating budget to hire
someone to write a solution to this problem. It simply may require
eliminating some other positions (Storyteller, Bugmeister, etc.). I think
the cost is worth the benefit. And for the price of one or two positions,
you could reasonably get three or four big features per year.
Alternately, I think eliminating projects such as Wikisource from the
Wikimedia umbrella would resolve (or largely mitigate) this issue. No
Wikisource, mostly no problem. I don't think it's Wikipedia that's really
clamoring for this ability, though it'd be nice there as well. More direct
focus on Wikimedia's part would make underlying bugs easier to triage,
surely.
One option that seems to be a complete non-starter to me is enabling
possibly dangerous code, even on a test environment, when the dangers are
known and unresolved. I still haven't seen anything to suggest this is a
good idea. Once someone has worked on the code for a while and addressed CPU
and memory issues, I think a labs wiki is a great idea. But before then?
Makes no sense to me.
I also can't help but imagine, given only your past actions on Bugzilla,
that you would take the interpretation ("a request to make machine-readable
musical notation available on the WMF cluster") to mean that if such
functionality became available on a labs wiki, the bug could be marked
resolved. This is, of course, completely outlandish and ridiculous, but it's
what I've come to expect.
MZMcBride
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