Hi,
On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:51 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
The issue, as I understand it, is that there's a good amount of non-MediaWiki-related technical documentation that people are now trying to shoehorn into mediawiki.org, as there isn't a better place for it. A sizable source of these pages is Wikimedia Foundation engineering-related documentation, some of which clearly belong on mediawiki.org, but some of which clearly do not.
This is how I understand the issue as well.
There was a proposal (in 2012, I think) to expand a "Wikitech" wiki, but it seems to have died fairly quickly. I'm not sure why.
The reasons as I recall them were:
* Expanding the scope of wikitech would require to open it up (it's been a fishbowl wiki for years), which would open it to vandalism, including subtle ones. A way to mitigate this could be to use a flavor of FlaggedRevs, but that thought made people shiver.
* Usernames / SUL: Wikitech needs to stay separate from the cluster, because the Ops team needs to be able to use it during an outage. This means no SUL and no benefiting from the help of stewards and their nifty tools to handle less-subtle-and-more-disruptive vandalism. A way to mitigate this could be to have wikitech on the cluster, and a read-only copy outside the cluster.
* Their was also a wish to merge the content of wikitech and that of labsconsole, because there's some redundancy (and because it makes sense, as Labs is a staging area for production, labsconsole documents Labs, and wikitech documents production). The best way to do that was thought to be to merge wikitech's content into labsconsole, and maybe rename labconsole to wikitech afterwards. But there's a lot of crap on wikitech, and it should be cleaned up before a merged is attempted. The Ops team is already convinced that wikitech's content needs to be cleaned up, but they have more pressing work.
Somebody add to this / correct me if I'm wrong. If I remember more, I'll send a follow-up.
A generic developer hub would logically be placed at Meta-Wiki. However, if the reality is that the developer hub is focused primarily at MediaWiki, having a page at Meta-Wiki where every link points back to mediawiki.org is a bit silly.
A lot of this could use more thought, but nobody really seems willing to plan this out and then execute the plan.
Work on this has indeed been deprioritized in favor of other activities like Tech ambassadors and volunteer product managers. If someone's interested, I can probably find a few draft plans that were discussed last year, and publish them somewhere public.