[Foundation-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has subdomains)

[Erik Moeller]

Angela-
> What sort of "Wikimedia presence" did you want there? Do the pages in
> the Wikimedia Foundation category not meet this?
> (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation)

For ourselves, yes. For the outside world, we need something that the  
average journalist can navigate. Every Wikimedia chapter will want to have  
a nice URL to give to people for signing up, donating ...

de.wikimedia.org, en.wikimedia.org etc. would be consistent with the  
wikipedia.org setup. The current community directory style content could  
be put on a separate page like it is done for the Wikipedia Main Page. The  
actual Wikimedia entry page would mostly contain
- links to all projects
- donation form
- membership application form (for chapters)
- contact information

Keep it simple and stupid. HTML is definitely needed for this as well as  
some backend processing scripts.

> If we split into sub-domains, it makes this easier to do, but if the
> translations are to be official, having 50+ recent changes for the
> board to check and approve makes this impractical.

True, but the current mixed RC isn't scalable without filtering. So  
whether you want filtering for the combined Meta, or synthesis-on-demand  
for the split up Meta, we need to add this type of functionality in any  
case. In lieu of a nice solution, a page "Pages waiting for board  
approval" on en and maybe fr would be sufficient.

> Allowing the use of interlanguage isn't necessarily better than the
> current system on meta. By using templates, the links only need be
> updated in one place when a new language is added. Normal
> interlanguage links would need to be updated on every sub-domain.

This is essentially a hack. It's better to fix the interlanguage link  
system (by using a shared link table) than to use a custom solution which  
people have to learn for a single wiki and which doesn't work anywhere  
else. Consistency is good - currently Meta is a special case and that  
creates a lot of problems (like the Help: namespace not being localizable,  
interlanguage links not in the same place as everywhere else, etc.).

> If the Foundation wiki and Meta are not separated, we have less
> control over it, as any sysop will be able to edit it

MediaWiki already supports limited rights management (write access to  
certain pages can be limited to one user group, e.g. "Wikimedia Editors").  
We could relatively easily extend this to allow for selectively enabling  
HTML support. Limiting edit rights should be kept to an absolute minimum  
for obvious reasons.

Regards,

Erik