On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 5:07 AM, Rehman Abubakr <rehman.wikimedia(a)live.com
wrote:
As earlier discussions on this topic received
relatively little response
from the community, I'm sending this email to let you know about the new
topic posted at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel#Wikimania_wikis,
with regards to having a single unified Wikimania wiki.
Comments inline:
From what I understand from the above linked discussion, some key points
against a unified Wikimania wiki was that:
1. We will not be able to preserve old Wikimania wikis as a "time capsule"
2. Older Wikimania organizers may face new organizers "steamrolling" over
their pages
3. Organizers will not have complete control over the site as old admins
might interrupt for whatever reasons. (or vice versa)
My though for these points was:
1. Why not have each Wikimania project branch their pages as
wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016/Main page, or alternatively, have
separate namespaces for each project (i.e. 2016:, 2017:, etc). We could
then protect all pages under a project (i.e. 2016/ or 2016:) once a project
is over.
However, this doesn’t solve the problem of the “time capsule” goal above.
The MediaWiki software of 2006 is very different from that of 2016, so the
design and implementation of an old Wikimania site might be broken as
MediaWiki gets upgraded for subsequent years.
2. This could be avoided by protection, as stated above.
Protection doesn’t do it. If it was all on one wiki, a Wikimania organizing
team is somewhat handcuffed by the decisions of accrued, previous years in
terms of organization, naming and templating. Since each Wikimania has its
own flavor and goals, a separate wiki seems to be the most in keeping with
this. Also, with unified login, the case for forcing everyone onto one wiki
for Wikimania is less compelling. I suppose the question also is - what
problem are we trying to solve by making everyone use the same wiki each
year?
> 3. Make it much less complicated. Once the project is over, all previous
> admin rights will be revoked, and the new organizers will get the rights.
> New admins can be advise to not modify previous project namespaces, or if
> better, if we can block previous projects' namespaces from editing?
> Furthermore, there could be a bot logging all changes made to old project
> namespaces, for transparency.
Actually, doing all that technical work of revoking, making a bot, and what
you describe sounds like more work than making a new wiki! :)
Now this is not to say what you suggested is not a good idea. But it has to
fit the right community and goals. For example, at Wikiconference North
America/USA, we have pretty much what you have suggested:
https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2014/Main_Page
https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2015/Main_Page
https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2016/Main_Page
But the reason why it’s the logical choice in our case of US/North America
– we are interested in continuity in the organizing team and principals. If
we can build on the efficiencies of each year for the next, so much the
better.
This is not something that is necessarily the case with Wikimania, because
of the change in the team, the goal of each Wikimania, and even the
languages of each Wikimania. They are very different each year, and each
team should have the freedom and flexibility to make it their own.
I don’t want to discourage new ways of thinking about Wikimania, it’s just
that this particular dimension seems like one of the more functional parts
of the conference.
-Andrew