Hi,
The way in which the Incubator works is extremely outdated. It is considerably more difficult to write there than to write in a usual Wikipedia domain. This is unfair, and there is no good reason for it. Some time ago I wrote a proposal for a thorough overhaul of how the Incubator works.
Very briefly, my proposal is: * Instead of putting all the languages in one place, create a wiki for each new language. * This wiki will not be a full-fledged domain that is fully equal to Wikipedia. The URL will look differently, and it will be possible to delete it easily if the wiki turns out to be problematic for any reason. * However, this wiki will support all the usual functionality of a wiki: user accounts shared with Wikipeia in other languages, Wikidata connectivity, extensions, templates, Visual Editor, Content Translation, etc. * The wiki will not demand the convoluted techniques that the Incubator demands, such as "Wp/abc/" prefixes. * If the wiki functions well and the Langcom approves it, it will be converted to a full-fledged domain. * (This applies to all Incubator projects and not only Wikipedia.)
For more details, see: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165585
The proposal is over a year old, but it didn't get a lot of responses from Language Committee members. I think that the time is ripe for starting to execute it, but to convince the right engineers and managers to do it, it would be nice to get some endorsements first.
If you support it, please leave a comment there. (If you don't know how to leave a comment in Phabricator, please contact me.)
If you have any reservations, please leave a comment there as well, or reply to this email.
Getting a unanimous endorsement email from all the Langcom members, or at least the active ones, will be particularly nice, but only if everybody actually agrees, of course :)
Thank you!
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Sounds like a good move to me.
J
On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 5:09 PM Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Hi,
The way in which the Incubator works is extremely outdated. It is considerably more difficult to write there than to write in a usual Wikipedia domain. This is unfair, and there is no good reason for it. Some time ago I wrote a proposal for a thorough overhaul of how the Incubator works.
Very briefly, my proposal is:
- Instead of putting all the languages in one place, create a wiki for
each new language.
- This wiki will not be a full-fledged domain that is fully equal to
Wikipedia. The URL will look differently, and it will be possible to delete it easily if the wiki turns out to be problematic for any reason.
- However, this wiki will support all the usual functionality of a wiki:
user accounts shared with Wikipeia in other languages, Wikidata connectivity, extensions, templates, Visual Editor, Content Translation, etc.
- The wiki will not demand the convoluted techniques that the Incubator
demands, such as "Wp/abc/" prefixes.
- If the wiki functions well and the Langcom approves it, it will be
converted to a full-fledged domain.
- (This applies to all Incubator projects and not only Wikipedia.)
For more details, see: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165585
The proposal is over a year old, but it didn't get a lot of responses from Language Committee members. I think that the time is ripe for starting to execute it, but to convince the right engineers and managers to do it, it would be nice to get some endorsements first.
If you support it, please leave a comment there. (If you don't know how to leave a comment in Phabricator, please contact me.)
If you have any reservations, please leave a comment there as well, or reply to this email.
Getting a unanimous endorsement email from all the Langcom members, or at least the active ones, will be particularly nice, but only if everybody actually agrees, of course :)
Thank you!
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Langcom mailing list Langcom@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom
I support the idea in general. Do you have any proposal about the existing incubator and migrating the whole content and related data to new wikis? It does not sound an easy task.
-- Santhosh Thottingal | സന്തോഷ് തോട്ടിങ്ങൽ Typeface designer and Language computing professional, Senior Software Engineer at Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering thottingal.in | smc.org.in
2018-07-25 6:19 GMT+03:00 Santhosh Thottingal <santhosh.thottingal@gmail.com
:
I support the idea in general. Do you have any proposal about the existing incubator and migrating the whole content and related data to new wikis? It does not sound an easy task.
Thanks.
Migrating existing incubators is probably one of the easiest things to do. When a new domain is approved and created, all the pages from the Incubator in that language are imported there, with automatic replacement of "Wp/xyz/" prefixes. As far as I know, it is a fairly easy, automatic, and quick process. So, the active Incubators should be imported the same way to the new framework. MF-Warburg usually does it, and I'd love to hear his input about this.
What to do about the inactive incubators? I'm pretty flexible about this. I guess that after exporting the active ones, we can simply make incubator.wikimedia.org read-only. It shouldn't be deleted because it's good to preserve community discussions there as an archive. If anybody wants to revive the inactive incubators, it will (probably) be possible to import them the same way. More nuanced proposals are welcome.
As far as I can see, the most challenging parts of my proposals are: 1. Creating a stable and automatic way to bootstrap a new wiki. At the moment this involves running a lot of scripts and making a lot of different manual configuration changes. The current manual process is documented at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Add_a_wiki . I know almost nothing about it. 2. Making sure that monitoring the multiple wikis for vandalism and spam works at least as well as it does for the current Incubator.
However, a comment in Phabricator by Martic Urbanec ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165585#4221392 ) says that both things are doable. He is often involved with creating new wikis, so we can trust his opinion.