Hi,
What would be the purpose of this organisation and separate community, exactly? Has there been any demonstrated need or even want for such an organisation amongst the community it would proportedly serve?
I ask in particular because as a third-party sysadmin myself, it's hard enough following all the relevant discussion and information that concerns releases as it is already. Adding another organisation on top of that, with its own lists and websites to check and follow, and another layer of community to go through to get things upstreamed, seems highly premature when we can't even consolidate the basics (release notes, date announcements, even testing) at home.
Considering we also have no guarantee that any new organisation would be more receptive to the needs and concerns of the third-party end users than the WMF is currently, and there would still be things we would need to go to the WMF directly about anyway (thus making it even harder to figure out where to go for something), I find this all very worrying.
-I
On 04/08/14 12:40, Markus Glaser wrote:
Hello everyone,
the Wiki Release Team invites you to get involved in a much needed effort to build a separate entity that cares about the third party use of MediaWiki. We ask for your involvement and participation because, as a community, we need to drive MediaWiki!
Be a part of something big!
- Join our mailing list of interested people on wikireleaseteam.org [1]
- Attend our first meeting [2]: Wikimania London Sunday, August 10, 2014 at 11:30AM GMT Hammerson Room and/or webstreaming
- Help us help you by providing feedback and comments as we work through an environmental scan and development roadmap
With the formation of the release team, a first step has been taken to separate the releases from the deployment process. Now is the time to tackle the task of building and working our way towards an organisation that cares for MediaWiki as a software product. This organisation will foster the MediaWiki third-party community, facilitate the exchange of ideas and resources among the third-party users, advocate the third-party needs, and advise the MediaWiki development from the third party perspective.
Spreading open knowledge is not just about content, but also about tools. However, third party users of MediaWiki have very specific needs that are naturally of minor interest to running Wikimedia sites. These include the installer, support for different platforms and databases, integration with other software, extension dependencies, and packaging, just to name a few.
Our mission, far from being complete, is just beginning. With your help and involvement we can make an impact to improve MediaWiki for the third party community.
Best, Mark Hershberger and Markus Glaser Wiki Release Team
[1] http://wikireleaseteam.org/ [2] https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/How_about_a_MediaWiki_C...
Mediawiki-enterprise mailing list Mediawiki-enterprise@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-enterprise