I'm actually glad you brought that up - it's a general topic that's been bouncing around in my mind lately.
I can appreciate the marketing concern. :) I think we'll need to be flexible in allowing the look and logo to remain intact. As I've been reviewing extension pages, I've noticed a healthy number of organizations/companies plugging their involvement in the effort. I'm not sure I'd encourage it, but I don't think it should be discouraged either.
I'm not sure if WMF has an official stance on the topic, but I would certainly strongly advocating for allowing such promotion of companies/orgs supporting specific efforts. Especially in light of the conversation about seeking donations for developers, etc. I'm not sure I'd be as comfortable with a master list of orgs doing that or some type of "these folks work with WMF" appearance. However, I see a clear line between mention on a specific tool or extension and wiki-wide pages including it. Perhaps a mention when linked from a hub. "URL Short URL Builder developed by Redwerks" seems reasonable as long as Redwerks maintains it.
Basically, giving credit where credit is due while an entity is actively engaged only seems fair. If we house that work on WMF servers in case something ever happens to that entity or their development priorities, we don't lose the work altogether. I have the same general feeling about the skin tutorial. Give Redwerks credit for developing it - but housing a copy (even if just a PDF or protected historical archives page) on WMF servers seems like the responsible thing to do. :)
My two cents. -greg aka varnent
ps. Daniel, I'm not predicting any problems or anything for Redwerks - just the example at hand. :) I'm ecstatic they're supporting the work! But the "capacity building" side of me is thinking of 5 years down the road. Lots can happen in one year, let alone five. :) Once they amass a huge client list, supporting this may take a lower priority.
On Feb 25, 2012, at 3:55 PM, Daniel Friesen wrote:
I can forward that. Technically since I logged work hours to write that and the MW Skinning tutorial I don't own the copyright for them, so I have to get an ok for anything like that. Keep in mind that the premise under which I was allowed to write them under work hours was that putting things out for MediaWiki under the Redwerks name could help draw more big clients like BASESwiki and CCA to us asking for us to design a skin for their wiki.
Btw, for reference the tool is written in Ruby (just Rack, no Rails). Ruby's URL handling libraries were miles better than PHP's. And the net library was better (native https support even). And a few other libraries as well. So I used Ruby rather than php.
For that reason, and of course other probable issues with it, I'd say the toolserver is out. Labs only.
On Sat, 25 Feb 2012 12:05:22 -0800, Mr. Gregory Varnum gregory.varnum@gmail.com wrote:
I think the tool is great!
Would it be possible to house on labs or toolserver? My only hesitation in linking to it is then we're dependent on Redwerks generosity in hosting. I think we should leave due credit to them and such in place.
-Greg aka varnent
Sent from my iPhone. Apologies for any typos. A more detailed response may be sent later.
On Feb 25, 2012, at 2:26 PM, "Daniel Friesen" lists@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote:
On Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:25:32 -0800, Antoine Musso hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
Daniel Friesen wrote:
Balanced? That section lists a single bad example of an /advantage/ for long urls.
Another advantage of long URLs, is for such corner case when the sysop team does not know about URL rewriting and has more important things to do than figuring it out. I have seen such cases in small company.
That's not really even an advantage. That's just not knowing how to configure your own software. The point is moot anyways, because the goal of the Short URL building tool is to make it so that you don't need to know. You just tell it where your wiki is. Tell it what path you want. And it'll guess your server setup, environment, and generate the config you need. You just then setup that config and poof.
-- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
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-- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
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