[teampractices] Why are WMF Department/team pages on mediawiki.org?

[Matthew Flaschen]

On 05/26/2015 12:44 PM, Kevin Smith wrote:
> This could just be my inexperience here. To me, maps and wikidata are
> clearly wikimedia software, but do not seem to be mediawiki software.
> They are "related" to mediawiki, but I'm not sure what that should mean.
> It sounds like you define mediawiki as being much broader than I was
> thinking.

Technically, the only thing that actually is MediaWiki is MediaWiki 
core, i.e. the wiki engine.

Everything else (CirrusSearch, VisualEditor, WikiBase/Wikidata, Maps, 
Flow, Gather, etc.) is software that integrates (or will, in the case of 
Maps) to MediaWiki in some way (tightly or loosely).

For example, the Maps team will presumably develop an extension that 
displays maps on MediaWiki pages (among other technical work). 
Wikidata.org is a MediaWiki site.

I think all of this belongs on MediaWiki.org and/or Wikitech.  The 
distinction between those two is a little more complicated.  A rule of 
thumb is that if it's documenting something in Puppet, it should go on 
Wikitech, otherwise it should go in MediaWiki.org.

While looking at this, I noticed that 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:About said, "MediaWiki.org is 
solely for the documentation of the MediaWiki software." and 
"MediaWiki.org has only one topic: the wiki engine MediaWiki."  Taken 
literally, this excludes extensions like CirrusSearch, Flow, etc. 
However, in reality these types of things have been here as long as I 
can remember (and probably longer).  I've boldly updated those docs.

> Thanks for continuing the conversation.

Thank you as well for raising this.  I hope this helps clarify.

Matt