On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Ori Livneh ori@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 10/01/2013 11:11 AM, Brion Vibber wrote:
Question for the group:
Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation?
If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen?
I'd say agree the best approach first with folks like https://www.mediawiki.org/**wiki/Hosting_serviceshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hosting_services
There are many small companies trying to make a living out of (among other things) MediaWiki hosting and expertise. If we are missing players more involved with the community then we could start knocking those doors rather than triying to build an own house and call it "official".
Can I just say: they're all dinky and antiquated and none of them come close to offering the kind of deployment and configuration experience that I expect a modern platform to have.
I don't like this "every time you have a new idea, God kills a Community member" approach. It'd be more productive to think about the role the Foundation could play in ensuring that MediaWiki exposes the right set of interfaces for deep integration with configuration management and cloud provisioning platforms, and ensuring that these interfaces are intuitive and well-documented. This might actually spur some innovation.
Other ideas for community engagement:
* Find out what version of MediaWiki each of these hosts is offering and nag the ones that lag behind to upgrade. * Find out which extensions (and which versions) each host is offering and lobby for the inclusion of new extensions. * Find out whether the management interface provided by the host describes MediaWiki in a manner that is compelling and accurate, and which concisely articulates MediaWiki's positioning relative to other wiki and content-management systems.