User:Org~enwiki/Wiki Software Development Party

The Wiki Software Development Party will run candidates for board member, with a goal of implementing our agenda.

Platform

Cut wasteful WMF spending

As much as bureaucrats may scream that their positions and programs are important, the reality is that they tend to stretch their work to fit the time and resources allotted to them. We keep hearing Wikimedia spokespeople say how amazing it is that WMF accomplishes so much with so little staff, but the truth is that WMF's accomplishments are mostly on the backs of volunteers, and that most of the staff is unnecessary and should be cut. Vote for us and we'll whip out our budgetary knife and cut that unhealthy fat out of the organization. We propose to:

• Cut unnecessary staff positions. (See talk page for details.) Severance should be limited to a month's pay.
• Cut unnecessary travel; hold all board meetings online, and publish all recordings/logs of such meetings online. Get rid of Wikimania and similar events.
• Stop raising money for wasteful projects like the usability initiative; raise money for worthwhile projects instead.

Allocate funding to high-priority software development

• Interwiki integration of all kinds (page existence detection, talk page notification, watchlists, recent changes, search, transclusion, etc.) — Crucial if we want to rescue our non-Wikipedia projects from stagnation.
• Semantic MediaWiki — Optimize it and install it! The academic community will be eternally grateful.

Eliminate all local chapters

This is an online project, not a project whose operations are tied to specific geographical regions. We already have WikiProjects for each country and separate wikis for each language; what do we need chapters for? They're an unnecessary distraction.

Implement Inclupedia

Wikimedia has been in need of a project to cover non-notable, but verifiable, content for a long time. Implementing the Inclupedia idea should be a high priority.

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Members

• Tisane ^talk/_stalk 23:58, 23 June 2010 (UTC).
• Timeshifter (talk) 08:58, 24 June 2010 (UTC). I agree with eliminating most non-technical positions (with reasonable severance packages). This would allow the hiring of more developers and technical people, whether as staff or on contract. Unified login allows development of Integrated watchlists. Other integration is also needed (templates, help pages, etc.). There are thousands of open bugs on bugzilla needing work. There are many features needed. I disagree with eliminating the "community founder" seat on the board. I trust the judgement of Jimmy Wales most of the time over many other people.