Thread:Project:WikiProject Extensions/Ideas/Link within Extension to allow developers to solicit donations/reply (8)

Much of that "ecosystem of extensions that WMF does not use" are merely fragments of code kludged together because the operator of an individual wiki needed something to perform a particular task on that one site. Unless we're dealing with commercial for-profit entities (for instance, wikitravel) authors usually have been willing to divulge the source code for any extensions being added onto MediaWiki on the off-chance they will be useful to someone else.

Sadly, much of that code is not actively maintained as often the authors aren't still around. This wouldn't be such an issue were it not for changes to core MediaWiki code which affect extensions ($wgMessageCache going away in MW 1.18+, for instance, broke extensions which had used it to add localisable strings in some now-obsolete manner).

I'm not sure if soliciting donations is going to help - unless the idea is to use them to pay someone else to take abandonware extensions, determine which are useful, bring them up to MediaWiki 1.18-1.20 standards and check them into SVN. Even then, to determine what of this mess of two thousand extensions is worthwhile would be no small task - many are either obsolete or simply duplicative of other extensions already in version control.

I don't agree with the idea of having paid WMF staff members take responsibility for a huge base of extensions which WMF has no intention of ever deploying on its wikis. That would lead to donated funds being used to subsidise non-WMF efforts such as Wikia and other for-profit wiki-farms, something which is outside its 501(c)3 charitable mandate.