Just reading the below gave me a though. Particularly on:
EMC, it seems, is mainly looking for companies which
want to share maintenance costs for popular extensions
If this is the case, which 'popular extensions' does this include? Most ones are
made popular because Wikimedia uses them (like checkuser) and are updated when they need
to be. Will the EMC now be covering the updates for these rather than Wikimedia?
Another question is for popular sought after extensions which Wikimedia provides no
support for, like CentralAuth. Would the EMC be in charge of this then? Make their own
version? Or something else?
In terms of Mediawiki and it's extensions development, I'd love to see things
being developed so it's more towards the wider community use and not just for
Wikimedia own use, like SecurePoll and CentralAuth is right now.
I feel that having extensions like this - which so many other wikis would love to have,
but only geared towards Wikimedia's own use goes against their own goal of sharing all
human knowledge.
Jasmine.
On 25 May 2017, at 09:24 pm, "Markus Glaser"
<glaser(a)hallowelt.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,
Following the announcement of an Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium (EMC) by Yaron Koren,
Brian Wolff and others asked about the position of the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group
(MWStake) with respect to this intiative. The announced enterprise consortium seems to be
a structured organisation led by Yaron. MWStake is a user group and Wikimedia affiliation.
We, MWStake, care for and are open to all involved parties. Naturally, EMC is also a
stakeholder in the MediaWiki world and is of course always invited to join us.
The stated goals of MWStake and the consortium are different - and complementary. MWStake
is supportive of the existence of the consortium as it is of the many other organizations
that contribute software to the MediaWiki ecosystem. We think Yaron's consortium can
serve the purpose of providing an aggregation of funding to support development projects
that might be too large for a single organization to fund themselves.
However, MWStake's vision is broader. Our approach is to work as a community. We aim
to foster the MediaWiki community and integrate them with concerted projects. We also seek
to intensify the cooperation between third-party users and the creator/owner of MediaWiki,
the Wikimedia Foundation. For that reason, the membership of MWStake consists of people
from both WMF and the third-party community. We discuss common problems on a regular basis
and work collaboratively towards integrative solutions and standards - because we have
enough one-off solutions and extensions that reinvent the wheel. We'd like to focus on
the challange of creating coherent systems. Following that approach, we aim to make the
MediaWiki platform a first-class entity in the movement, as we see MediaWiki usage outside
of WMF projects as part and parcel of the WMF vison. Specifically, "every single
human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge" by providing them with the
means for independently sharing their own knowledge.
A word about institutionalisation: We plan to incorporate when the time is right.
Presently, we think that this will be when we have finished some projects and have created
a sufficiently large network of organisations and corporations that will join and
contribute.
Some of our accomplishments so far: We regularly open common places and communication
channels for all stakeholders by organizing panels, presentations and discussions at
conferences and meetings (e.g. the "Fantastic MediaWiki" track at the Hackathon
in Vienna). Moreover, we are making requirements by third-party users visible (e.g. the
MediaWiki user survey and feature wishlist). As individuals, we contribute to the
MediaWiki project over a wide range of developments, bugfixes, code contributions and
translations. These include PluggableAuth, HitCounters, DisplayTitle, extension store
discussion, and more. Increasingly, we coordinate our concrete development efforts.
So what are our next steps? We are going to restart the LDAP extension following the
concrete plan of action which was devised in a public meeting at the Vienna Hackathon. We
will improve extension documentation of extensions maintained by members of MWStake
(about 100) at
MediaWiki.org. And we work on the visibilty of current MediaWiki
developments to foster the attractiveness of the platform.
We agree with Yaron's position that the organisations EMC and MWStake actually have
different goals and strategies. EMC, it seems, is mainly looking for companies which want
to share maintenance costs for popular extensions. Meanwhile, MWStake seeks to integrate
and coordinate the efforts around MediaWiki without requiring a monetary contribution.
Any cooperation with organizations like EMC is welcome.
We encourage MediaWiki users to work with Yaron and the EMC if that fits their needs, but
we also welcome them to collaborate with the WMF and us to make MediaWiki better for
everyone.
This text was jointly written by
Mark Hershberger, Cindy Cicalese, Richard Heigl, Markus Glaser
MediaWiki Stakeholders Group
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: MediaWiki-l [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von Yaron
Koren
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 25. Mai 2017 19:54
An: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Betreff: Re: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing: the Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium
Hi Brian,
That's a reasonable question. Both this consortium and the MediaWiki
Stakeholders' Group have the general aim of making things better for
"enterprise" users of MediaWiki, but beyond that the two have surprisingly
different goals and approaches. The MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group, or MWStake, has a
large number of goals, but a big part of it, as I understand, is working with the
Wikimedia Foundation and core MediaWiki developers to make sure that the needs and desires
of enterprise users are taken into account. That sort of advocacy is not what the EMC is
concerned with. On the other hand, MWStake also does some coordination on volunteer
efforts at software improvement, so in that sense the two are more similar.
I'm not familiar with a corporate sponsorship thing for MWStake, but even if that
happens, the two are quite different in terms of their decision-making approach. Anyone
can join MWStake, and then decisions are made (as I understand it) via discussion and
consensus. With the EMC, you have to pay to get in, and then there's a precise system
of weighted voting to allocate the funds.
It certainly could happen that the two organizations could coordinate, yes.
And some companies could end up being members of both. Nonetheless, I see these as
distinct organizations, and it seems like there's a need for both.
Thanks!
-Yaron
On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 12:25 PM, Brian Wolff
<bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday, May 24, 2017, Yaron Koren
<yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:
Hi,
I'm very excited to announce the launch of the Enterprise MediaWiki
Consortium (EMC), an organization devoted to supporting and
maintaining "enterprise MediaWiki" software.
As you may know, a lot of open-source software has some sort of
organization or foundation that is intended to pool money from users
of
the
software toward developers. MediaWiki is in an
unusual situation: it
is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation (and, to a lesser extent,
Wikimedia Deutschland and others), but those organizations' primary
allegiance is
to
software that runs on Wikimedia sites. That
leaves a lot of
MediaWiki-related software (extensions, skins, etc.) that is mostly
intended for use on non-Wikimedia sites, i.e. "enterprise" uses:
some of this software has significant usage, but very little of it
has institutional support.
That is where the Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium fits in. It is
intended to fund the development of extensions and other software
that otherwise
has
no funding source. The set of software being
funded is entirely up
to the membership of the EMC, and of course the amount of support
that can be provided depends on the amount of money that members
contribute - an
amount
that will hopefully grow over time.
If you belong to an organization, company or website that makes use
of MediaWiki - and specifically, of MediaWiki-related software not
used on Wikimedia sites - please consider joining the Enterprise
MediaWiki Consortium - to provide much-needed support for the
software you use, and to have a greater say in shaping its future.
You can read more about the EMC here:
http://enterprisemediawikiconsortium.org/
-Yaron
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Out of curiosity, what is the relation between this group and
MWStakeholders group. Im given to understand that MWStake was also
considering having a corporate sponsership thing too (I may bemistaken
on that though). Do you envision the two groups working together, or
do you see them as being entirely separate and independent?
Best of luck in this new venture,
--
Brian
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WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting ·
http://wikiworks.com
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