All,
Right now, all methods of getting support for and general discussion about MediaWiki fall flat in many areas.
* This mailing list is good for long-form questions and answers, but is difficult to search leading to multiple duplicate questions. The nature of the list also makes things like embedding screenshots difficult. * [[Project:Support desk]] on mediawiki.org is serviceable, but long-form questions or answers require a large amount of scrolling due to the narrow content width in Flow, and again attaching screenshots to illustrate problems is difficult. * The #mediawiki channel on IRC (and related channels) are not easy for newbies to discover or use, and many organizations block IRC meaning that we cut off this support method from those at such organizations who have MediaWiki questions. Like the other support methods, screenshots are also difficult.
As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It aims to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support compared to the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as a hub where people who run their own MediaWiki installations can connect, share tips, and network. To my knowledge, there is no such “MediaWiki Users Group” outside of mailing lists at this time. The service is ad-free and content posted is available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so that particularly good answers can be used to bolster documentation on mediawiki.org.
I encourage anyone that is interested to check it out, and please let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about it 😊.
Regards,
Skizzerz
Isn't this rather a replication of the trial Discourse forum at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ ? (Which, unfortunately, is offline for an upgrade at the moment!)
But anyway, sounds like an interesting idea. :-)
What software is it using?
On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, at 06:10 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
All,
Right now, all methods of getting support for and general discussion about MediaWiki fall flat in many areas.
This mailing list is good for long-form questions and answers,but is difficult to search leading to multiple duplicate questions. The nature of the list also makes things like embedding screenshots difficult.
[[Project:Support desk]] on mediawiki.org is serviceable, butlong-form questions or answers require a large amount of scrolling due to the narrow content width in Flow, and again attaching screenshots to illustrate problems is difficult.
The #mediawiki channel on IRC (and related channels) are not easyfor newbies to discover or use, and many organizations block IRC meaning that we cut off this support method from those at such organizations who have MediaWiki questions. Like the other support methods, screenshots are also difficult.
As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It aims to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support compared to the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as a hub where people who run their own MediaWiki installations can connect, share tips, and network. To my knowledge, there is no such “MediaWiki Users Group” outside of mailing lists at this time. The service is ad-free and content posted is available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so that particularly good answers can be used to bolster documentation on mediawiki.org.
I encourage anyone that is interested to check it out, and please let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about it 😊.
Regards,
Skizzerz
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
From my understanding, the point of Discourse was to be simply a Q&A site. This forum has this as well, however it aims to also build a community of MediaWiki users and admins beyond just a Q&A so that there's a place to go to just talk about MediaWiki in general, share tips, spitball ideas to make life easier for 3rd party wikis, and so on. A section of the site is also devoted to listing professional services for hire, a bit of an analog to [[Professional development and consulting]] on mediawiki.org[1], except with more of an ability for users to have a back-and-forth and leave reviews.
I don't see this site as replacing any existing means of obtaining support. There's still advantages to the existing methods out there that forums don't quite meet (IRC is more realtime, mailing lists give flexibility in how to view the content, the on-wiki support desk allows anonymous edits -- although I can enable anonymous/guest posts as well on the forums if people think that would be beneficial). I felt that there was a large hole in the existing offerings, and I had the technical means and ability to fill in that hole.
It is using a software package called Invision Community. It is unfortunately not FOSS software, however I felt that the feature-set and end user experience it offered surpassed any of the FOSS alternatives.
Regards, Skizzerz
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Professional_development_and_consulting
-----Original Message----- From: MediaWiki-l [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sam Wilson Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2017 3:56 PM To: mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing new MediaWiki forum
Isn't this rather a replication of the trial Discourse forum at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ ? (Which, unfortunately, is offline for an upgrade at the moment!)
But anyway, sounds like an interesting idea. :-)
What software is it using?
On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, at 06:10 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
All,
Right now, all methods of getting support for and general discussion about MediaWiki fall flat in many areas.
This mailing list is good for long-form questions and answers,but is difficult to search leading to multiple duplicate questions. The nature of the list also makes things like embedding screenshots difficult.
[[Project:Support desk]] on mediawiki.org is serviceable, butlong-form questions or answers require a large amount of scrolling due to the narrow content width in Flow, and again attaching screenshots to illustrate problems is difficult.
The #mediawiki channel on IRC (and related channels) are not easyfor newbies to discover or use, and many organizations block IRC meaning that we cut off this support method from those at such organizations who have MediaWiki questions. Like the other support methods, screenshots are also difficult.
As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It aims to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support compared to the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as a hub where people who run their own MediaWiki installations can connect, share tips, and network. To my knowledge, there is no such “MediaWiki Users Group” outside of mailing lists at this time. The service is ad-free and content posted is available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so that particularly good answers can be used to bolster documentation on mediawiki.org.
I encourage anyone that is interested to check it out, and please let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about it 😊.
Regards,
Skizzerz
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
_______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, at 07:07 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
From my understanding, the point of Discourse was to be simply a Q&A site. This forum has this as well, however it aims to also build a community of MediaWiki users and admins beyond just a Q&A so that there's a place to go to just talk about MediaWiki in general, share tips, spitball ideas to make life easier for 3rd party wikis, and so on. A section of the site is also devoted to listing professional services for hire, a bit of an analog to [[Professional development and consulting]] on mediawiki.org[1], except with more of an ability for users to have a back-and-forth and leave reviews.
I don't see this site as replacing any existing means of obtaining support. There's still advantages to the existing methods out there that forums don't quite meet (IRC is more realtime, mailing lists give flexibility in how to view the content, the on-wiki support desk allows anonymous edits -- although I can enable anonymous/guest posts as well on the forums if people think that would be beneficial). I felt that there was a large hole in the existing offerings, and I had the technical means and ability to fill in that hole.
It is using a software package called Invision Community. It is unfortunately not FOSS software, however I felt that the feature-set and end user experience it offered surpassed any of the FOSS alternatives.
I think the Discourse installation started as an investigation into how it might work as a replacement for wikimedia-l and/or other mailing lists — so very much forum-oriented rather than Q&A. It could perhaps be both though.
It sounds like a good idea, and even having a forum outside of the Wikimedia world could be an advantage. I guess my first thought is about how this will avoid the fate of that earlier forum — which is why I was wondering about the software, because if it was FOSS then you could conceivably make some form of regular content dump available that could be used in case the site ever disappeared; if it's closed-source this is less easy (not impossible, of course).
Ryan, thank you very much for trying to solve a problem!
I agree that building the community is the hardest problem. It's the same problem we have with MediaWiki developers, right? While I don't want to stop you from trying, I wonder whether we wouldn't all save time and energy if we try to come up with a common plan.
Precisely these days I am thinking about this very exact problem. This is why I requested admin permissions for discourse.wmflabs.org (and then I broke it, do I get a shirt? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T179649 ).
This is the scenario that I have in mind (this is my personal opinion shared for the first time here, please don take this as a Wikimedia Foundation anything):
* One Discourse https://www.discourse.org/ instance for MediaWiki users, administrators and developers. The scope here should be as wide and inclusive as possible, as long as we are talking about software: extensions, gadgets, templates, bots, tools, apps, SemanticMediaWiki... everything.
* One Discourse instance for the Wikimedia movement, minus the tech community which will be covered by the previous one. I have more ideas here but this is mediawiki-l and I don't want to bore you. ;)
Both instances would be hosted in Wikimedia with Single Sign-on ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124691). Discourse has a multisite setup that saves some sysadmin work and server resources. We would nurture a group of Discourse savvy moderators and admins to spread the work and have extra fun.
Because at Wikimedia every big idea must find a small starting point, I am starting by proposing Discourse to solve the problem of developer support. The Developer Relations team is currently busy with Outreachy, Google Code-in and what not, but if someone wants to help pushing the idea of the Discourse instance for MediaWiki & Wikimedia tech, we will help you. I guess it is a matter of combining a bit of community discussion and consensus with some ad-hoc prototyping with a new Discourse instance in wmflabs (the one I broke has a Wikimedia non-tech motivation and could be the embryo of the second instance proposed above.
Interested? See you here:
Provide an easy to use support system for contributors to ask technical questions https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155678
On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 7:53 AM, Sam Wilson sam@samwilson.id.au wrote:
On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, at 07:07 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
From my understanding, the point of Discourse was to be simply a Q&A site. This forum has this as well, however it aims to also build a community of MediaWiki users and admins beyond just a Q&A so that there's a place to go to just talk about MediaWiki in general, share tips, spitball ideas to make life easier for 3rd party wikis, and so on. A section of the site is also devoted to listing professional services for hire, a bit of an analog to [[Professional development and consulting]] on mediawiki.org[1], except with more of an ability for users to have a back-and-forth and leave reviews.
I don't see this site as replacing any existing means of obtaining support. There's still advantages to the existing methods out there that forums don't quite meet (IRC is more realtime, mailing lists give flexibility in how to view the content, the on-wiki support desk allows anonymous edits -- although I can enable anonymous/guest posts as well on the forums if people think that would be beneficial). I felt that there was a large hole in the existing offerings, and I had the technical means and ability to fill in that hole.
It is using a software package called Invision Community. It is unfortunately not FOSS software, however I felt that the feature-set and end user experience it offered surpassed any of the FOSS alternatives.
I think the Discourse installation started as an investigation into how it might work as a replacement for wikimedia-l and/or other mailing lists — so very much forum-oriented rather than Q&A. It could perhaps be both though.
It sounds like a good idea, and even having a forum outside of the Wikimedia world could be an advantage. I guess my first thought is about how this will avoid the fate of that earlier forum — which is why I was wondering about the software, because if it was FOSS then you could conceivably make some form of regular content dump available that could be used in case the site ever disappeared; if it's closed-source this is less easy (not impossible, of course).
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Hi Ryan,
Sounds like a great idea, but as it is won't it have a critical mass problem? Meaning the other methods used right now, like this mailing list, are attached one way, or another, to mediawiki.org and therefore draw people in. Without a lot of conversations, and questions answered, it won't show up on Google, and therefore newbies, and others, won't go. But only by getting a lot of people to go will questions be answered.
My suggestions to get around the problem described above are: 1. Select a manageable list of common problems and post the answers to the new forum, 2. See if mediawiki.org would add a link to your forum on every extension page (or at the top of every talk page) like they do currently with Wikiapiary (under the check usage link).
Anyways I wish you good luck with the forum. I hope it succeeds, but fear it will not get off the ground since it falls outside the needs of the software as advanced by the primary driver of the software (Wikipedia). Maybe I'm too skeptical, but having watched the evolution of mediaiwki for years now I've noticed a decidedly non-enterprise bent to the development of the software (for example, the 2015 Mediawiki Stakes Holder's survey, as I recall, found an overwhelming number of enterprise users wanted: 1. easily installation, upgrade and extension management (fundamentally years later no change, except for the use of composer for extension management, but at the cost of excluding all small wiki creators who don't have command line access, or lack the knowledge), 2. Visual editor (same as one -- and nothing about installing the visual editor is quick and easy), 3. More skinning and UI options (this one area that has seen an improvement with Foundation and Bootstrap options available) and 4, access control and management (this is one area of backwards development: the most popular access control extension, Lockdown, doesn't work with any Mediawiki pass 1.26). Additionally the very helpful, Extension Matrix, stopped working in 2013, which means there has no easy method to find new extensions for four years. So I hope I'm wrong to be skeptical and I hope your forum thrives.
Sincerely,
Chris
On Nov 8, 2017, at 2:56 PM, Sam Wilson sam@samwilson.id.au wrote:
Isn't this rather a replication of the trial Discourse forum at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ ? (Which, unfortunately, is offline for an upgrade at the moment!)
But anyway, sounds like an interesting idea. :-)
What software is it using?
On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, at 06:10 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote: All,
Right now, all methods of getting support for and general discussion about MediaWiki fall flat in many areas.
This mailing list is good for long-form questions and answers,but is difficult to search leading to multiple duplicate questions. The nature of the list also makes things like embedding screenshots difficult.
[[Project:Support desk]] on mediawiki.org is serviceable, butlong-form questions or answers require a large amount of scrolling due to the narrow content width in Flow, and again attaching screenshots to illustrate problems is difficult.
The #mediawiki channel on IRC (and related channels) are not easyfor newbies to discover or use, and many organizations block IRC meaning that we cut off this support method from those at such organizations who have MediaWiki questions. Like the other support methods, screenshots are also difficult.
As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It aims to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support compared to the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as a hub where people who run their own MediaWiki installations can connect, share tips, and network. To my knowledge, there is no such “MediaWiki Users Group” outside of mailing lists at this time. The service is ad-free and content posted is available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so that particularly good answers can be used to bolster documentation on mediawiki.org.
I encourage anyone that is interested to check it out, and please let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about it 😊.
Regards,
Skizzerz
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Chris,
That is indeed the main problem I forsee with it, as with any new community-oriented site. Building up a community organically is hard and time-consuming. This is why I'm promoting it in a respectful manner here and elsewhere. Around 10 years ago, there was a successful forum with a very similar name which I helped moderate and assisted with quite a bit, but it fell by the wayside and I was unable to get through to the former owner in order to revive it. Given how far in the past it was, I felt that it's about time someone tried to fill that niche again.
Thank you for your suggestions on what can be done in order to help increase the likelihood it is used. If you or anyone else has further suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Let me know what I can do in order to draw you to start using it, even for non-Q&A purposes. Feel free to reply in private to avoid cluttering the list.
Regards, Skizzerz
-----Original Message----- From: MediaWiki-l [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of chris tharp Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2017 6:18 PM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing new MediaWiki forum
Hi Ryan,
Sounds like a great idea, but as it is won't it have a critical mass problem? Meaning the other methods used right now, like this mailing list, are attached one way, or another, to mediawiki.org and therefore draw people in. Without a lot of conversations, and questions answered, it won't show up on Google, and therefore newbies, and others, won't go. But only by getting a lot of people to go will questions be answered.
My suggestions to get around the problem described above are: 1. Select a manageable list of common problems and post the answers to the new forum, 2. See if mediawiki.org would add a link to your forum on every extension page (or at the top of every talk page) like they do currently with Wikiapiary (under the check usage link).
Anyways I wish you good luck with the forum. I hope it succeeds, but fear it will not get off the ground since it falls outside the needs of the software as advanced by the primary driver of the software (Wikipedia). Maybe I'm too skeptical, but having watched the evolution of mediaiwki for years now I've noticed a decidedly non-enterprise bent to the development of the software (for example, the 2015 Mediawiki Stakes Holder's survey, as I recall, found an overwhelming number of enterprise users wanted: 1. easily installation, upgrade and extension management (fundamentally years later no change, except for the use of composer for extension management, but at the cost of excluding all small wiki creators who don't have command line access, or lack the knowledge), 2. Visual editor (same as one -- and nothing about installing the visual editor is quick and easy), 3. More skinning and UI options (this one area that has seen an improvement with Foundation and Bootstrap options available) and 4, access control and management (this is one area of backwards development: the most popular access control extension, Lockdown, doesn't work with any Mediawiki pass 1.26). Additionally the very helpful, Extension Matrix, stopped working in 2013, which means there has no easy method to find new extensions for four years. So I hope I'm wrong to be skeptical and I hope your forum thrives.
Sincerely,
Chris
On Nov 8, 2017, at 2:56 PM, Sam Wilson sam@samwilson.id.au wrote:
Isn't this rather a replication of the trial Discourse forum at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ ? (Which, unfortunately, is offline for an upgrade at the moment!)
But anyway, sounds like an interesting idea. :-)
What software is it using?
On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, at 06:10 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote: All,
Right now, all methods of getting support for and general discussion about MediaWiki fall flat in many areas.
This mailing list is good for long-form questions and answers,but is difficult to search leading to multiple duplicate questions. The nature of the list also makes things like embedding screenshots difficult.
[[Project:Support desk]] on mediawiki.org is serviceable, butlong-form questions or answers require a large amount of scrolling due to the narrow content width in Flow, and again attaching screenshots to illustrate problems is difficult.
The #mediawiki channel on IRC (and related channels) are not easyfor newbies to discover or use, and many organizations block IRC meaning that we cut off this support method from those at such organizations who have MediaWiki questions. Like the other support methods, screenshots are also difficult.
As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It aims to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support compared to the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as a hub where people who run their own MediaWiki installations can connect, share tips, and network. To my knowledge, there is no such “MediaWiki Users Group” outside of mailing lists at this time. The service is ad-free and content posted is available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so that particularly good answers can be used to bolster documentation on mediawiki.org.
I encourage anyone that is interested to check it out, and please let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about it 😊.
Regards,
Skizzerz
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
_______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 2:10 PM Ryan Schmidt skizzerz@gmail.com wrote:
As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It aims to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support compared to the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as a hub where people who run their own MediaWiki installations can connect, share tips, and network.
Wasn't there a forum like this years ago? IIRC, it never reached critical mass and shut down.
-Chad
It shut down because the owner at the time lost interest in keeping it up and was seemingly unwilling or unable to transfer it to someone else. The forum was pretty popular — not hundreds of posts a day, but it was rarely quiet for long periods of time.
Past success is not an indicator of present success; the internet landscape has changed since then and internet forums in general are less popular than they used to be. That said, results so far are encouraging and I believe as more questions and other content is added it will eventually reach that critical mass.
My focus right now is in building a user base and offering reasons to hang out. My most recent effort in that regard is to offer tools that sysadmins can use to make their life easier. I launched a tool to generate configs for pretty urls[1] and next up are some tools to ease deployment of complicated extensions like VisualEditor and Scribunto (including dependencies like Parsoid or the luasandbox PHP extension).
[1] https://mwusers.org/apps/pretty-url-generator
-- Ryan Schmidt Sent from my iPhone
On Nov 9, 2017, at 9:43 AM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 2:10 PM Ryan Schmidt skizzerz@gmail.com wrote:
As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It aims to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support compared to the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as a hub where people who run their own MediaWiki installations can connect, share tips, and network.
Wasn't there a forum like this years ago? IIRC, it never reached critical mass and shut down.
-Chad _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
This does sound rather interesting and I'll look into checking it out as I've often found the official support desk can have questions missed and never answered.
One thing I would suggest is encourage people to learn how to do it themselves with easier to understand guides - like SecurePoll or CentralAuth. The guides for these either don't exist or bare minimum so support in these types of areas would be nice.
On 9 Nov 2017, at 06:42 pm, "Ryan Schmidt" skizzerz@gmail.com wrote:
It shut down because the owner at the time lost interest in keeping it up and was seemingly unwilling or unable to transfer it to someone else. The forum was pretty popular — not hundreds of posts a day, but it was rarely quiet for long periods of time.
Past success is not an indicator of present success; the internet landscape has changed since then and internet forums in general are less popular than they used to be. That said, results so far are encouraging and I believe as more questions and other content is added it will eventually reach that critical mass.
My focus right now is in building a user base and offering reasons to hang out. My most recent effort in that regard is to offer tools that sysadmins can use to make their life easier. I launched a tool to generate configs for pretty urls[1] and next up are some tools to ease deployment of complicated extensions like VisualEditor and Scribunto (including dependencies like Parsoid or the luasandbox PHP extension).
[1] https://mwusers.org/apps/pretty-url-generator
-- Ryan Schmidt Sent from my iPhone
On Nov 9, 2017, at 9:43 AM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 2:10 PM Ryan Schmidt skizzerz@gmail.com wrote:
As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It aims to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support compared to the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as a hub where people who run their own MediaWiki installations can connect, share tips, and network.
Wasn't there a forum like this years ago? IIRC, it never reached critical mass and shut down.
-Chad _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
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