Hi,
On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:51 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)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.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation