Ryan, thank you very much for trying to solve a problem!
I agree that building the community is the hardest problem. It's the same
problem we have with MediaWiki developers, right? While I don't want to
stop you from trying, I wonder whether we wouldn't all save time and energy
if we try to come up with a common plan.
Precisely these days I am thinking about this very exact problem. This is
why I requested admin permissions for
discourse.wmflabs.org (and then I
broke it, do I get a shirt?
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T179649 ).
This is the scenario that I have in mind (this is my personal opinion
shared for the first time here, please don take this as a Wikimedia
Foundation anything):
* One Discourse <https://www.discourse.org/> instance for MediaWiki users,
administrators and developers. The scope here should be as wide and
inclusive as possible, as long as we are talking about software:
extensions, gadgets, templates, bots, tools, apps, SemanticMediaWiki...
everything.
* One Discourse instance for the Wikimedia movement, minus the tech
community which will be covered by the previous one. I have more ideas here
but this is mediawiki-l and I don't want to bore you. ;)
Both instances would be hosted in Wikimedia with Single Sign-on (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124691). Discourse has a multisite setup
that saves some sysadmin work and server resources. We would nurture a
group of Discourse savvy moderators and admins to spread the work and have
extra fun.
Because at Wikimedia every big idea must find a small starting point, I am
starting by proposing Discourse to solve the problem of developer support.
The Developer Relations team is currently busy with Outreachy, Google
Code-in and what not, but if someone wants to help pushing the idea of the
Discourse instance for MediaWiki & Wikimedia tech, we will help you. I
guess it is a matter of combining a bit of community discussion and
consensus with some ad-hoc prototyping with a new Discourse instance in
wmflabs (the one I broke has a Wikimedia non-tech motivation and could be
the embryo of the second instance proposed above.
Interested? See you here:
Provide an easy to use support system for contributors to ask technical
questions
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155678
On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 7:53 AM, Sam Wilson <sam(a)samwilson.id.au> wrote:
On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, at 07:07 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
From my understanding, the point of Discourse was
to be simply a Q&A
site. This forum has this as well, however it aims to also build a
community of MediaWiki users and admins beyond just a Q&A so that there's
a place to go to just talk about MediaWiki in general, share tips,
spitball ideas to make life easier for 3rd party wikis, and so on. A
section of the site is also devoted to listing professional services for
hire, a bit of an analog to [[Professional development and consulting]]
on mediawiki.org[1], except with more of an ability for users to have a
back-and-forth and leave reviews.
I don't see this site as replacing any existing means of obtaining
support. There's still advantages to the existing methods out there that
forums don't quite meet (IRC is more realtime, mailing lists give
flexibility in how to view the content, the on-wiki support desk allows
anonymous edits -- although I can enable anonymous/guest posts as well on
the forums if people think that would be beneficial). I felt that there
was a large hole in the existing offerings, and I had the technical means
and ability to fill in that hole.
It is using a software package called Invision Community. It is
unfortunately not FOSS software, however I felt that the feature-set and
end user experience it offered surpassed any of the FOSS alternatives.
I think the Discourse installation started as an investigation into how
it might work as a replacement for wikimedia-l and/or other mailing
lists — so very much forum-oriented rather than Q&A. It could perhaps be
both though.
It sounds like a good idea, and even having a forum outside of the
Wikimedia world could be an advantage. I guess my first thought is about
how this will avoid the fate of that earlier forum — which is why I was
wondering about the software, because if it was FOSS then you could
conceivably make some form of regular content dump available that could
be used in case the site ever disappeared; if it's closed-source this is
less easy (not impossible, of course).
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Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil