James Forrester wrote:
On 20 September 2012 08:54, Quim Gil quimgil@gmail.com wrote:
Alright, let's move onto the next round: which dev hub?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_developer_hub http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_hub
mediawiki.org is a better default landing place for developers than Meta, do you agree?
Is it worth considering the merge of both pages, as it has been suggested?
And in any case the API should be promoted upfront. Now the Meta hub has no mention (I could find) while the dense MediaWiki hub features the link if you are patient to find it (or you use the search, as I did).
Of course, we already have a link to the mediawiki.org front page on every page we serve - that's what the "Powered by MediaWiki" button links to. There, the four most prominent links are:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Installation
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker
I assumed that the point of this additional link was to take people to our API because we already use our bully-pulpit to ask for more developers quite strongly, but people who want to use us as a service need to dig further to even know we have one. If all we're doing is duplicating the general "hey, you're a techy person" link with another text label, this exercise will have lost its value.
Hi!
Sorry for starting this thread and then disappearing for a bit; it's been a busy week.
I've taken the (wonderful!) comments in this thread and on bug 33464 and synthesized them into a requests for comment here: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?curid=99106.
To address your point specifically, the "Powered By MediaWiki" button is a bit of promotion (or advertising, branding, whatever) for the MediaWiki software. What we're discussing here is something different. Based on how other sites behave, I think there's a reasonable expectation that if you want to figure out, generically, how to get involved, looking in the footer of the Web site is a reasonable place to start.
Most of my thoughts are in the RFC now on mediawiki.org, but my big revelation earlier this week was that I don't think we really have an audience problem as some have suggested. The people we want to attract are all developers (which is why I suggested using "Developers" as the link text).
That said, I think the first step in the landing page should be to split _by motivation_:
* are you wanting to re-use Wikimedia wikis' content; or * are you wanting to contribute code to Wikimedia/MediaWiki?
From there, you can sub-divide based on programming language, component
(user interface, ops, etc.), and a bunch of other variables. My mock-up for the tree/matrix/wizard is here: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?oldid=585564#Blueprint.
MZMcBride