(((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@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@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!