On 29 Sep 2016 10:10 pm, "Marcin Cieslak" saper@saper.info wrote:
Dnia 28.09.2016 Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org napisał/a:
Summit sessions are considered tasks themselves, not just a conversation happening in a room and eventually documented in a wiki page.
I think this kind of captures the opinions expressed here very well (if it could be one sentence).
a. Some folk prefer Phabricator because it provides workflow, tracking, boards, hierarchy (task->substask), explicit (scrollable) history, short URL's.
These are some things that Phabricator does very well, and it wouldn't make sense to reinvent the wheel to put them in MediaWiki - MediaWiki is a wiki after all, and not dedicated project management/bug tracker software.
b. Others prefer MediaWiki because it is easier to cooperate in-place, visual editor, better search, good linking, readable titles and being
loyal
to our own tools.
Phabricator's linking to tasks is good when you use the {resource} format. The MediaWiki visual editor is good, and it can be used on mobile, unlike Phabricator's preview mode when adding comments to tasks, which has never worked.
I'd say (a) set of requirements is better for typical (classic) project management, for something bound in time and resources that needs to be managed swiftly.
Set (b) of requirements provides better community involvement,
transparency
and it is easier to maintain things that are perpetual work in progress (never need to be really "done").
(a) is better for "fast moving consumer goods" of sorts, (b) is better for long-term stuff.
But wiki is not a "final resting place" of a documentation polished elsewhere. Things should not become "eventually documented in a wiki page").
Agree.
In my other note I wrote how CCC is using pentabarf submission and conference scheduling tool for (a) and MediaWiki for (b) probably for the same reasons we have here.
I think I kind of share both points of view: my event organiser's brain is with (a) but my volunteer heart is with (b).
One nice solution would be to teach Phabricator to treat links to wiki items as first-class objects that can be tagged, prioritized, deadlined, assigned, traced etc. I could imagine having MediaWiki pages as items on the project board and some correspondence between categories and phab tasks and boards. A casual look on the Phabricator does not reveal we have a Task for that (but it might be I could not find it) .
There is one more thing that may explain why we are having this discussion for now: Phabricator filled with content we have at the moment is very difficult to search. I literally have to remember titles of the tasks
Phabricator search is terrible. I have trouble every time I need to find something on Phabricator, to the point that it is easier to go and search through where I originally found out about the task, e.g. IRC logs.
to try to somehow find them again. I have a feeling (that might be our fault and not software's) that it's filled with temporal junk which was there only for the purpose of some workflow/tracking sometime ago. I somehow feel our Phabricator instance is overloaded with those shooting starts (events, shortlived action items etc.).
This has started to annoy me some time ago (especially given my ad-hoc and seasonal interest in MediaWiki development) but it has never overflowed enough to say something about it, I just sighed and moved on.
I think many participants in this thread feel something similar and this thread just got hijacked to express something a bit broader than the original purpose of this discussion.
Saper
sent from a desktop device. please excuse my verbosity.
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