(cross-posted to labs-l and wikitech-l)

I've been thinking quite a bit about Tool Labs developers over the past couple of months. Last week I was in San Francisco for the Wikimedia Developer Summit and had an opportunity to talk to a number of people about some of my ideas. One of them that got a pretty good reception was a few proposed changes to the wikitech.wikimedia.org wiki.

I've started "Make wikitech more friendly for the multiple audiences it supports" phab task [0] and started adding blocker tasks for various ideas that have come up in the discussions. One is to enable a "Portal" namespace on wikitech [1] to be used to make landing pages for different audiences. Another is to add a "Tool" namespace [2] that the various Tool Labs projects could use to document their projects. A third is to disable searching "Nova resource" pages by default [3].

The wikitech wiki doesn't currently have what anyone would consider an active on-wiki community to seek consensus from on topics like this so I am reaching out to what I hope are relevant mailing lists to gather feedback. Discussion of why any of these ideas is a great or horrible idea is welcome here on list or possibly even better on the phabricator tasks themselves. Again since we don't have a strong social norm for when consensus has been reached for this wiki I'm going to arbitrarily suggest that discussion remain open until 2016-01-20 after which time I will take further steps to have the new namespaces enabled (or got back to the drawing board if the concept is rejected).

[0]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123425 [1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123427 [2]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123429 [3]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T122993

Bryan