On Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:10:38 -0700, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
I think the potential migration of content to wikitech and the potential use of certain MW extensions to improve the user experience are legitimately separate issues.
Yeah. It seems like some are suggesting that some of these docs should be moved to wikitech because they would work better if SMW is available. While at the same time suggesting that not all the docs would be moved to wikitech. Which quite frankly stinks of a conflict to me. Because I can see a lot of stuff on MW.org that would be better with SMW and would fall under the banner of things that are suggested would stay on MW.org.
It simply stands to reason that if we distribute a lot of content from a large wiki to a much smaller one, the number of times that you'll have to go back and forth between the two to find what you're looking for will increase. API docs? Over here. Status update? Over there. Extension installation docs? Over here. Specs related to the same extension? Over there. Ping, pong. Ping, pong. The divisions may seem logical to us, but for the confused technical contributor, things could easily get a lot worse.
If feasible, I would at the end of the day still argue in favor of a single consolidated technical wiki. I realize calling that wiki mediawiki.org is not ideal, but beyond the domain name, a lot can be done to provide reasonable divisions (namespaces, navigation, etc.), so that MediaWiki the product and other Wikimedia technical projects and processes are clearly distinct. Let's also not forget that we'll have future potential for new MediaWiki-related technical contribution that actually would fit very nicely under the mediawiki.org umbrella (e.g. Lua script repository, gadget repository).
+1
More things fit under the MediaWiki (and related) umbrella than many here would admit.
I can understand Labs/Wikitech being another wiki for auth purposes. Like bugzilla uses another auth.
But beyond that I don't like the idea of it being used to split the documentation of related things even more making it harder to find. It was hard enough eliminating the split of MediaWiki related documentation and projects onto Meta. And it STILL is. Wikidata is actually documenting a great deal of wikidata stuff including a lot of ContentHandler stuff on Meta instead of MW.org. And only putting small documentation on MW.org with almost no reference at all to the Meta pages where the original design ideas planned things.
And honestly. It would be kind of nice if we could link LDAP indirectly to MW accounts. And make it easy to point MW developers on MW.org to a special page on MW.org to setup the credentials they use to log into Gerrit to commit and comment on core.