On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip]
But there is another point here, which is how narrowed / inclusive are we with the "MediaWiki" word. You can see it as the name of a CMS. You can see it as a name of a wider community. Looking at the content at mediawiki.org it is obvious that such community does a lot more things than developing a CMS.
Why not calling all those things under the MediaWiki umbrella, and refer to the CMS as MediaWiki Core?
I don't really like that idea. It may be because I'm just cranky and dislike change ;) but MediaWiki and the rest of Wikimedia's technical stuff are fairly orthogonal. I can work on MediaWiki without caring about Wikipedia and friends. I could also work on non-Wikimedia technical infrastructure without caring about MediaWiki. (However, non-MediaWiki Wikimedia tech stuff needs a more concise name (or names). There's a lot of things in this category including "wiki-templates", local gadgets, puppet/ops related stuff, some of the mobile stuff, and there is no good name to describe it.)
We use names to describe things. If the names become too broad they could lose their usefulness. I would also be concerned that by making MediaWiki (the CMS) subordinate to general wikimedia technical activities by renaming MediaWiki to MediaWiki-core [and having mediawiki=wikimedia-technical-thingies] it could alienate some contributors who are primarily interested in MediaWiki and not Wikimedia. On the other hand that could quite possibly be an imagined problem.
As for actual hackathon naming (whatever happened to hackaton, I thought that was a cute name) . I don't think it really matters. Call it MediaWiki if its primarily focused on MediaWiki, call it Wikimedia if its more focused on Wikimedia things. Call it Wikipedia if you really must [As someone who originally came to Wikimedia land via a non-Wikipedia project, calling Wikimedia things "Wikipedia" makes me go grrr, but I recognize that Wikipedia is a more recognizable brand]. To be honest making naming requirements sounds like a bikeshed discussion.
-bawolff