On Don, 2003-01-30 at 05:09, Takuya Murata wrote:
> Actually I am not so sure about what is more democratic
> system. I said the system of wikipedia should be more
> democratic because it seems to me that the decision about
> the wikipedia system doesn't reflect well the opinion among
> the majority of wikipedians,
Actually, the wiki code is developed in a manner very similar to wiki
articles themselves. CVS access is granted fairly liberally, so almost
anyone can modify the software. Like wiki, CVS stores all previous
revisions, so it's always possible to revert if necessary. To avoid
problems, we use a manual mechanism similar to FileCopy, in the form of
Brion occasionally updating the live sever. This part could be more
formalized, and probably should be eventually.
Given this, I'm surprised we don't have more active coders. Right now,
it's mostly Brion, Magnus, Tomasz (TeX) and me. There are really few
valid excuses not to participate, given that PHP is easy to learn and
all the tools you need are free. If you have time to work on Wikipedia
articles, you have time to work on Wikipedia code.
The only real difference is that you need to be a coder to participate.
Since we're dealing with code, I don't think this can be much improved.
Importing the code into wiki doesn't make much sense -- we should use
the right tool for the right job. CVS is tried and tested and works well
in this situation, so do SourceForge's tools.
When there are conflicts about features we try to resolve them either
before or after the feature is introduced, depending on personal
judgment. Knowing that there are *always* people who disagree about
something if you ask if there are people who disagree makes it tempting
to wait until someone complains *after* a feature has been added.
Compare it to asking on a Talk page before making a change, or just
making the change and waiting until someome complains.
But if by "democratic" you mean that the coders need to work on what the
non-coders decide then, sorry, that's not gonna happen. If you want
that, I have a long list of articles that I want to be written ..
Regards,
Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS -
http://www.berlios.de