Hi Yuri, thank you for bringing up this.

On 04/17/2013 09:25 AM, Yury Katkov wrote:

Hi everyone! So we've had some discussions that are summarized here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Third-party_MediaWiki_users_discussion/Summary

In this letter I want to point out to two projects that haven't been organized by Wikimedias, but are still very useful for the people who think about MW as of open source product:

1. http://www.mwusers.com - MediaWiki forum. Many people prefer forums to

mailing lists and wikipages like Support desk. Moreover, MWusers is now a good Q&A database.

Yes, a very useful community that solved promptly all my problems as a 3rd party MediaWiki superamateur sysadmin.

They are referenced in many pages. If you have other ideas just propose, or edit directly.

http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?search=mwusers&title=Special%3ASear...

2. http://wikiapiary.com A wiki with various statistics about MediaWiki

installations and statistics about extensions. I see the huge potential in this project although it's only several months old. Template:Extension on mediawiki.org have finally turned to something useful when the link to wikiapiary had been added there.

I'm also impressed about this project. It's so good that I wondered who made it, why and with which resources. :)

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Extension has a field for it, and therefore plenty of extensions link to it through "Check usage and version matrix".

If WMF/Wikimedias interested in promoting MediaWiki not as WMF project but as a piece of open source software, it can be beneficial to help those projects with information support (i.e links from MediaWiki.org), funding and cooperation.

Content and links in mediawiki.org: just do it, right? The WMF as such doesn't play a big role deciding here and each of us documents whatever is related with our work and whatever we still have some time to improve - just like anybody else.

Funding: the same doors are just as open for these initiatives as for anybody else. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start

Cooperation: any ideas? For instance, it would be great to get mwusers.com involved in activities around improving QA or documentation. This would save them some users posting questions about the same problems originated by some problem in MediaWiki or mediawiki.org.