On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:21 PM, Theo10011 <de10011(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Could you provide some URL to point to how this idea
of groups came upon
for India. I only saw the staff leading the way for this instead of this
coming about organically.
This happened on IRC over a few hours, between me, quim and harsh. Most of
the conversation was quim convincing me that a mediawiki-india list would
be a much better Idea than a MediaWiki India User Group (which he succeeded
in), and Harsh volunteering to start the Ahmedabad one. The logging bot has
been wonky, so no logs.
As for 'why User Groups, why not a SIG' - the User Group idea is neither
unique nor novel - it is a very well understood concept. Linux User Groups,
Python User Groups, Ruby User Groups, Java User Groups, etc abound on
per-city levels. This is just another user group for a piece of open source
software. MediaWiki does not run just Wikipedia, but is also (IIRC) the
most popular software used for standalone wikis. Plenty of projects that
use MediaWiki have nothing to do with the Wikimedia movement (An experiment
with using Semantic MediaWiki for Public Transit routing a bunch of us
tried a few years ago, the w3c wiki (
w3.org/wiki), lots of internal
company's documentation wikis, lots of open source software wikis, etc).
And 'why formalize their affiliation'? IIRC you need to go through the
process to obtain the right to use 'MediaWiki' in your group's title. That
is all (from my perspective, at least).
--
Yuvi Panda T
http://yuvi.in/blog