I edited the topic on wiki ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiDev17/Topic_ideas#Collaboration) a little bit, to separate out the "Technical Collaboration" and "Editor Collaboration" pieces a bit. Both are interesting, although I feel like the target audiences would diverge greatly. It would be most interesting to explore how those subtopics could be profitably combined -- why not dogfood our own tools to do code review with the same mechanisms we use to review wikitext diffs? -- but I admit that may well be a step too far. Perhaps simple juxtaposition at the summit will accomplish the desired cross-fertilization.

It is perhaps unfortunate that we have an existing team named "Collaboration". It creates a whiff of toe-stepping and cookie-licking danger to have a topic eponymous with an existing team. The page you cite ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Collaboration) is actually quite useful in distinguishing the broad idea of "collaboration" from the actual remit (and great work!) of the currently-constituted team.

Part of why I suggested this summit topic was that I felt that a proper response to its challenge would of necessity be *cross team* and *whole org*. I think our individual parsing, editing, reading, collaboration, etc teams do a reasonable job setting their own goals. But what is missing is the sort of discussion and decision-making that can occur at a broad summit, where we reconcile (for example):

* improvements to discussion pages (collaboration team) * real-time collaborative editing (editing team) * the introduction of "user groups" backing WikiProjects to the core DB (mythical "core team") * broading the notion of "a revision" in core DB (mythical "core team") * real-time reading (reading team) * social factors in UX to preserve and strengthen and diversify our community and stop harassment (community engagement, design teams) * existing workflow mechanisms and projects (collaboration team, mythical wikiedu team) * better diff tools (collaboration team + editing team) * draft namespace/merge tools (i don't think anyone owns this)

So perhaps naming the topic "Collaboration" is as much a mistake as it would be to name a topic "Editing", "Discovery", "Reading", etc.---although I don't have another name to propose---since the goal for a summit topic should be to identify opportunities to solve problems which have proven difficult to resolve with only smaller-scale collaboration inside our existing team structures. To identify fixed points of consensus upon which we can, Atlas-like, shift the entire organization. :) --scott

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 1:53 AM, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:

Scott suggested the following as one of three suggested topic ideas for WikiDev17. The three ideas:

1. Collaboration
2. Wikitext Maintenance
3. Machine Translation

More inline about "1) Collaboration" below:

On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 10:05 AM, C. Scott Ananian cananian@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

*1. *(A unified vision for) *Collaboration*

• Real-time collaboration (not just editing, but chatting, curation,

patrolling)

• WikiProject enhancements: User groups, finding people to work with,

making these first class DB concepts

• Civility/diversity/inclusiveness, mechanisms to handle/prevent

harassment, vandalism, trolling while working together

• Real-time reading -- watching edits occur in real time
• Integration with WikiEdu
• Broadening notion of "an edit" in DB -- multiple contributors,

possibly multiple levels of granularity

• Tip-toeing toward "draft"/"merge" models of editing
• Better diff tools: refreshed non-wikitext UX, timelines, authorship

maps, etc.

I've copied this wholesale into the "Collaboration" area on [[WikiDev17/Topic ideas]], and quoted it directly here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Tbypptt9myumu7q7

Let's use this thread to focus on this part of Scott's proposal. A lot of these seems in scope for the Wikimedia Collaboration team. Does the scope that you're thinking of align with what the team has published on their page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Collaboration

Rob (p.s. please feel free to start separate threads with the other parts of Scott's proposal)

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