So, I'm actually trying to avoid using an etherpad. The use case I can see
for it that I'd be okay with is "we have a lot of meetings and it's a good
place to jot things down so we have something tangible to take away from
them", but we don't have that many meetings - and those conversations not
had on
mediawiki.org with people outside the core team are normally ported
there pretty quickly.
The alternative is to use Etherpad as a place that people not in the core
team can jot down notes, ideas or proposals. I'm kinda unenthused by this
either. My thinking is that it invites sharding of the conversation (and
not the cool kind of sharding Terry will give you a small lecture on if you
mention it to him). If there are two venues for discussion or note-jotting,
one of which involves wikimarkup, a lack of simultaneous editing and the
whole log-in-and-or-register shebang, a lot of people are going to choose
to use Etherpad. However, most community members are going to use
MediaWiki.org, which means that we're going to either have a disconnect
between people or a need to check two venues to keep up to date, which
increases the barrier for consistently engaging with the project.
There's also an argument to be made that we should be trying to avoid using
external software when we have a home-built piece that essentially does the
same job :). I know quite a few people who get frustrated when we use gdocs
instead of a wiki instance for the same reason. If there are problems with
MediaWiki that substantially increase the barrier for doing this kind of
work on it, great: I want to hear them! If we hear them, we can look at
trying to fix them :). But for the time being, MediaWiki.org's talkpage
(and the proposed future projects section on the project page) is where
it's at.
On 29 August 2012 17:18, Arun Ganesh <arun.planemad(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Oliver and Vibha, and its good to see that the
wiki pages got some
cleanup :)
Can I also suggest that we have a common etherpad that is used to note
down things related to the project? Pau and I have been coordinating work
this way for the translation ux improvements[1] and it works quite well for
staying in sync with each other.It can also give an external person a quick
view of any recent activity that has not yet gone on mediawiki. If you guys
already have existing etherpads, can you share the link on the MW page?
[1]
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/l10n-translation-ux
--
Arun Ganesh
(planemad) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Planemad>
Geography.Information.Design
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Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation