On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:09 PM, Isarra Yos <zhoris...@gmail.com> wrote:
The 95% statistic may not be meaningful, but neither is this. The number of > users involved does not reflect the importance of the information presented > any more than that a project exists at all. > > The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people > around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free > license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and > globally. > > This applies whether a project has several thousand active users building > a general encyclopedia of common topics, or a team of ten working on a > collection of bird names, or even one single individual putting together a > chronicle of their family history. MediaWiki is a platform that empowers > all of these, and to turn your back on them directly contradicts > Wikimedia's overall mission. > I believe the claim is being made that many of those people with tiny one-off self-hosted projects are *not* being well-served right now by a MediaWiki instance that's out of date with security holes and no new features. Here's where I tend to make the comparison to WordPress: WordPress is open source and available for self-hosting (including on shared hosts with PHP and MySQL), but a lot of people find it's a pain to maintain -- even with the HUGE usability and upgrade improvements that WordPress folks have made in the last few years. I personally maintain my own WordPress blog, and pretty much just occasionally make a security update and otherwise hardly touch it. Plenty of other people do this too, with varying degrees of success staying up to date and fixing occasional operational problems. But lots of people also use WordPress's hosted service as well. No need to manually install security upgrades, maintain your own vhost, etc. In our comparison, we have MediaWiki for self-hosters, and we have hosted projects for Wikimedia, but if you want a hosted wiki that's not covered in ads your choices are vague and poorly documented. I would argue that many small projects would be better served by good wiki farm hosting than trying to maintain their own sites. Sure, that's not for everyone -- but I think the people who are best served by running their own servers have a lot of overlap with the people who would be capable of maintaining multiple services on a virtual machine. -- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
