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@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

---

Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design