Audience: * Folks who patrol and use testwiki regularly

TL;DR: * WMF would like to add some content to testwiki to support testing MediaWiki deployments. * That content may be seen as conflicting with [[testwiki:Wikipedia:What Test Wiki is not]]'s "content or anything meaningful" clause. * What reasonable compromise to allow this class of testing content can we establish?

I have just opened a "Adding some local content pages for Pretrain project testing" [0] topic on testwiki's Village pump. The TL;DR above is the gist of the post. We are working on a project called Pretrain [1] that is creating a new automated MediaWiki deployment process. This project needs some test content on testwiki to help validate the deployments there using a new "automated supervision" [2] process we are developing. The imagined test content may conflict with interpretations of testwiki's "What Test Wiki is not" [3] guidance.

I would like to find compromises / compensating controls that make it possible to add the desired testing pages to testwiki without causing problems for the folks who patrol that wiki or polluting the internet with stale copies of content articles that might confuse readers. If you are a person who regularly patrols testwiki edits, periodically cleans up testing garbage that accumulates there, or has another reason to care how testwiki content is managed I would appreciate your feedback on the Village pump proposal [0]. I am hoping to reach an initial agreement rather quickly, but certainly do not want to rush reasonable debate about our options.

[0]: https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump#Adding_some_local_con... [1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/Pretrain [2]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T428972 [3]: https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Test_Wiki_is_not

Bryan