(((Please someone help forwarding this email to wikimediaindia-l as I'm
not subscribed there. Thanks!)))
Thank you Yuvi and others for your determination pushing this first
MediaWiki regional list and other ongoing local initiatives in India. As
technical contributor coordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation I have no
doubt that tools like this will help increasing and diversifying the
MediaWiki community and therefore the technical capacity of the
Wikimedia movement!
As you say this is our first experiment. Give us your feedback and
Expect some fine tuning on the go. The definition of MediaWiki regional
lists is documented at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Groups#Local_vs_regional and I'm still
editing that section almost on a daily basis based on our early
experiences with mediawiki-india.
The nature of this regional lists is related to the MediaWiki Groups, a
flavor of Wikimedia User Groups that the MediaWiki community is
developing with the approval of the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee. At
a MediaWiki community level we have agreed that those groups need to be
really local, covering an area that a regular contributor could cover
easily with public transport or a car to get involved in the activities
organized.
Under this perspective, a MediaWiki Group Gujarat would be more
appropriate than a MediaWiki Group India, and a MediaWiki Group
Ahmedabad would me more appropriate than a MediaWiki Group Gujarat. You
get the point. We have no plans to change this principle: MediaWiki
supporters in India always have the Wikimedia India chapter for more
complex activities at a regional or national level in India.
But this left a void to reach out potential technical contributors in
places where no MediaWiki local group exists. Imagine an engineer in
Bangalore, interested in contributing her skills in MediaWiki and
Wikimedia technical projects but not really interested in following the
day to day of Wikimedia India. mediawiki-india can fill now this gap,
and could help that engineer in Bangalore to find other peers in the
area and start working on a MediaWiki Group Bangalore.
This is how we expect the MediaWiki community grow locally in India and
elsewhere.
Yuvi, just a couple of comments related to your announcement:
On 12/29/2012 06:39 AM, Yuvi Panda wrote:
Hello everyone!
As part of growing a sustainable technical community around MediaWiki in
India, a new mailing list has been created. You can subscribe to it at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-india
Looking forward to having more Mediawiki hackers from India!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Yuvi Panda* <yuvipanda(a)gmail.com <mailto:yuvipanda@gmail.com>>
Date: Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 2:17 PM
Subject: Welcome to the MediaWiki India List!
To: mediawiki-india(a)lists.wikimedia.org
<mailto:mediawiki-india@lists.wikimedia.org>
Hello everyone!
Welcome to the mediawiki-india list! This list is simply a place for
like-minded folks from India working on MediaWiki/Wikimedia related code
to talk about whatever they're doing. A good level of event planning
would happen too, I think.
Post random ideas you run into. Interesting tricks you've discovered.
How completely horrible some gadget in some wiki is. Or how you've
hacked mediawiki to be a storage engine for your public transport
crowdsourcing project. Or how you are just getting started and want
help. Ask for help in setting up a mediawiki instance for your company.
For porting a gadget from english wikipedia to your own language's
wikipedia. For anything, really.
Well, not anything. We need to be respectful with the existing mailing
lists and avoid unnecessary fragmentation. Let's direct topics and
people to the right lists, where the experts in each area are found. For
instance, generic MediaWiki questions in English still make more sense
in mediawiki-l.
The topics should cover what lists like wikitech-l, mediawiki-l and
other MediaWiki lists are missing e.g. regional coordination or support
in languages other than English without an own mailing list.
I'm sure you will find the balance.
This is the first country-level technical mediawiki
list, ever. We've no
idea how this is going to be used, so please do go wild
Happy hacking, everyone!
... and for exactly those reasons this announcement should be posted at
wikitech-l and mediawiki-l as well. Feel free fine tuning it with my
feedback. It might save you one reactionary reply or two.
Thank you and best wishes for MediaWiki community in India!
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil