Thread:Project:WikiProject Extensions/Ideas/Link within Extension to allow developers to solicit donations/reply (9)

"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."


 * All correct. The easiest way to figure out which extensions are worth the trouble is by allowing people to donate for their maintenance. The problem appears huge until you give control back to the WMF's stakeholders, and let them decide what is worth maintaining. Obviously, the WMF can pick a few too.

"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."


 * That is a valid concern, but I don't think it inevitably leads to that conclusion. Firstly, MediaWiki is a WMF effort, including MediaWiki extensions. Secondly, for-profit users of MediaWiki are among the most generous supporters of WMF, MediaWiki, and extensions. Many of them recognize the long term benefits of supporting the WMF, even when there's no immediate benefit for them in the short term by doing that.