On Tuesday, April 2, 2013 at 5:45 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
I have been drafting a proposal to attract new
contributors, help them
settle in, and connect them to interesting tasks. It turns out that many
of these problems are not unique to new contributors. We suffer them as
well and we are just used to them.
The proposal has evolved into a deeper restructuring of our community
spaces. We're still drafting it, but a round of wider feedback is
welcome before opening the official RFC at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Wikitech_contributors
In summary:
*
wikitech.wikimedia.org (
http://wikitech.wikimedia.org) would become the one and only
site for our open
source software contributors, powered by semantic software and an
ontology of categories shared across wiki pages, Bugzilla and hopefully
Gerrit.
That seems wrong. Of the two,
MediaWiki.org is clearly the more successful wiki. It is
larger by all measures, and draws a wide pool of active contributors. This is reflected in
the quality of the documentation, which (pace self-deprecating humor) tends to be quite
good. Up until recently a good portion of the links on Wikitech's main page pointed to
content that was flagged as obsolete. It has come some way since then, but not quite
enough to subsume mediawikiwiki.
The core of MediaWiki is in my mind still radical and exciting: you make or find a page,
click edit, and just type into it. This seems to have gotten buried over the years under a
pile of bad ideas and bad implementations, and skewered from the outside by
MegaTronEditKillerLaserBot2000 and the like. The solution is not to pile additional layers
on top, but to excavate MediaWiki from underneath them and make it fast as hell and
simple, so that it once again feels like a dangerous, underspecified, liberating idea.
Semantic this-and-that and ontologies of categories entails putting up rails everywhere
and signs with arrows on them indicating which way you should go. That approach will
inevitably end up reflecting a narrow, inflexible view of what a wiki is and what you do
with it. And all the while MediaWiki will creak and groan from underneath.
--
Ori Livneh