[teampractices] Why are WMF Department/team pages on mediawiki.org?

[Nick Wilson (Quiddity)]

A few thoughts...

Putting anything on wikimediafoundation.org
a) greatly limits the number of people who can edit/update the pages at all
(IIRC not all staff have had accounts created at that wiki. And non-staff
have to request an account via meta
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Request_for_an_account_on_the_Foundation_wiki>
)
b) reduces who will see any updates in their watchlist (I assume I'm not
alone, in not checking my watchlist at that wiki very often. Plus it
becomes very difficult for anyone without an account on that wiki to keep
track of changes)
c) and makes it very difficult for anyone to communicate with the team as a
whole, onwiki. (IIRC many pages at foundationwiki have equivalent pages on
meta, for exactly that reason.)
d) adds a (bad) symbolic separation between staff and the communities.

Wikitech isn't part of the SUL system, so has similar (but smaller)
problems.

I believe the historic reason that the product teams have their team pages
at mediawiki, is because that was (and still is) essentially their "home"
wiki - where all the primary onwiki documentation and discussion occurs.
Similarly, the depts such as Community Resources
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources> have their team page
at meta - their "home" wiki, where their core work occurs.

Hence, I would recommend meta or mediawiki, as the best place to continue
keeping documentation about individual teams.

The argument could be made that *all* team pages should be on meta, and
that seems reasonable to me at first thought (but it's ~2am so don't hold
me to that!), but I'd suggest asking much more widely before proposing a
move of that magnitude.
However, I'm still not clear on what it would *solve or improve*, and IAR
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ignore_all_rules> exists to prevent us
from slavishly following rules just for the sake of it. Possibly I'm
missing a perspective or three, though!

Tangentially, I would very much like us to *link to* those existing
meta/mediawiki team pages, more consistently/thoroughly, from the staff page
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors>. I've been
meaning to suggest that for a while, and will do so once this discussion
comes to a conclusion.

Hope that all helps!
Quiddity


On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 1:05 AM, James Douglas <jdouglas at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> > Naively, it seems like our home page should be on
> wikimediafoundation.org rather than mediawiki.org.
>
> +1
>
> > For engineering departments, it is less clear, but since the entire
> "department" structure is an artifact of the WMF, and not of the mediawiki
> software, my gut reaction would be the same.
>
> +1
>
> > Technical pages (such as CirrusSearch) make sense to be on mediawiki.org.
>
>
> +1
>
> > Are there historical or cultural reasons to keep the team pages on
> mediawiki.org?
>
> /me shrugs
>
>
> On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Alex Monk <amonk at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Thank you for this email, Kevin. This is something that's bugged me for
>> several years as a mediawiki.org administrator - are these pages
>> actually within the site scope
>> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:About#What_MediaWiki.org_is>? (I
>> don't think I've ever deleted a page for it, but they don't exactly make
>> sense as mediawiki.org pages)
>> Some of those really Wikimedia-specific technical pages should  probably
>> be on wikitech.wikimedia.org, and some of the more WMF-organisation
>> (i.e. teams) pages on wikimediafoundation.org, in my opinion.
>>
>> On 21 May 2015 at 23:14, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Naively, it seems like our home page should be on
>>> wikimediafoundation.org rather than mediawiki.org.
>>>
>>> For engineering departments, it is less clear, but since the entire
>>> "department" structure is an artifact of the WMF, and not of the mediawiki
>>> software, my gut reaction would be the same.
>>>
>>> Technical pages (such as CirrusSearch) make sense to be on mediawiki.org.
>>>
>>>
>>> Are there historical or cultural reasons to keep the team pages on
>>> mediawiki.org?
>>>
>>>
>>> Kevin Smith
>>> Agile Coach
>>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
>>> the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.*
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> teampractices mailing list
>>> teampractices at lists.wikimedia.org
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Alex Monk
>> VisualEditor/Editing team
>> https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Krenair_(WMF)
>>
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>>
>>
>
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>


-- 
Nick Wilson (Quiddity)
Community Liaison, Product
Wikimedia Foundation
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