First type of channel: persistent documentation and planning.
I'd say stay on Meta for now, and move to "Wikilambda" or whatever it is called as soon as an initial version is ready for public use. Additionally there will presumably be detailed technical specifications and discussions flowing through phabricator and github/gitlab or whatever we are using for the actual extension code.
Second type of channel: asynchronous, ephemeral discussions.
Has somebody expressed concerns about this mailing list? Let's stick with it for now; we can add a technical one if this becomes too busy.
Third channel: synchronous discussion
I have never been happy with IRC, maybe because I haven't figured out how to get a reasonable client (what do people generally use for it?) that keeps me logged in for a reasonable amount of time. I'm not familiar with Zulip, but it sounds like it's an open-source version of Slack, so that could be good. But we have the Telegram channel active now, unless there are many people who really can't use that let's stick with that for the time being. The IRC bridge some people have mentioned could work well if there are people who can use one but not the other?
Arthur
On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 9:27 AM Denny Vrandečić dvrandecic@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello all,
The first topic of discussion I want to start is also the most awkward to start with - it is akin to the question “Can you all hear me?” at the beginning of a talk. The ones who already hear will obviously be happy, and the ones who don’t won’t have a chance to chime in.
What communication channels should we start with?
My thought would be that there is a need for three different channels:
- First and foremost, a channel to document decisions, essays, documents,
plans, etc.
- Second, a channel for asynchronous discussion, announcements, etc.
- Third, a channel for synchronous discussion, for quick discussions,
office hours, socialization, and later, when testing and deployment starts, for quick feedback
Let’s go through these.
First type of channel: persistent documentation and planning. Currently it is on Meta, but there are plenty of others that could be considered (criteria: Must enable translation):
- Stay on Meta
- MediaWiki.org
- WikiSpore
- Wikidata
- Start our own wiki right away
- A mix of the above
- Others?
Second type of channel: asynchronous, ephemeral discussions. Currently it is this mailing list, and a growing number of metawiki talkpages (thanks Chris Cooley for starting a discussion about this here!). Here I don’t see that many possible channels:
- A different existing mailing list
- A second new mailing list to focus on technical aspects
- Zulip
- dropping this channel in favor of the first and third type of channel
- Others?
Third channel: synchronous discussion. Currently, nothing is ‘blessed’ as such a channel, but there’s already a lively number of unofficial places that have been opened and discussed here (thanks ZI Jony!). As far as I can tell, there’s:
- #wikipedia-abstract on IRC
- #wikilambda on IRC
- Zulip
- AbstractWikipedia channel on Telegram is already quite lively
- Dropping this channel in favor of the first and second channel
- Others?
I have listed these options more with a goal of partial-completeness, not because I would be happy with all of them. Personally, I’d be so unhappy with e.g. blessing a Facebook group as the main official channel, so I have not included that. I am equally uneasy with a Telegram chat, but it’s also about going where the communities are - for example, my preference for the chat would be IRC, but I am a dinosaur.
Here are my thoughts:
- I would like to keep the number of channels small, so we don’t frizzle
our energy out. That’s particularly important for the beginning.
- Any official channel may require additional Foundation approvals, but I
don’t want to use resources evaluating all the possible channels beforehand if most of them are not of interest for us anyway.
- We should have permanent records of all official channels.
- All official channels should be under appropriate Terms of Services and
Code of Conduct.
- Ideally, the community would coalesce and grow on official channels.
- Ideally, the channels we choose are aligned with our values.
No decision we make now is meant to be permanent, and as the project develops and the community grows, we expect to see this shift and change.
I am afraid that the main language for discussion in the beginning will be English. We will rely on community support to cover contributions in other languages as best as possible, but I am afraid it will not be possible to translate every discussion contribution and every essay. Sorry.
Besides these discussion channels, we will also have the usual stack of technologies supporting a Wikimedia development project: Phabricator for tasks, Git for version control, etc. For that, we’ll mostly follow Foundation best practices.
I am looking forward to hear from you, Denny
Abstract-Wikipedia mailing list Abstract-Wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/abstract-wikipedia