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

[Quim Gil]

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 12:14 AM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Naively, it seems like our home page should be on wikimediafoundation.org
> rather than mediawiki.org.
>

In Wikimedia there are many discussions about taxonomy, but this is not one
of them. Our team pages are communication tools, and the first question to
answer is what do we want to tell to which audience.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors?showall=1
responds well to the question "Who works at the Wikimedia Foundation?", and
such question might come from media, donors, our community fellows,
ourselves... It seems to be located in the right place and it contains
appropriate information -- including links to team pages.

Engineering & Technology team pages are slightly different, though. All
these teams are working on open source software projects, and there you
usually want to explain the mission of the team, goals, current work, links
to related documentation, how to get involved... It is a mixture of
transparency and engagement targeted to actual and potential technical
contributors, from developers to tech-curious users.

While we have certain control on where to send people via links, we have a
lot less control deciding where people land in the first place. There are
many factors into play, enough to create a Search team to deal with them
 :), but there is a basic principle that usual applies: mass. If you
concentrate all the developer related content in a single site, that site
increases its mass of content, but also hopefully its mass of users, mass
of links pointing to the site... With all that, the gravity and capacity of
attraction of new users also increases.

Based on this principle, I have been trying to help moving all the tech
related content to mediawiki.org (from Meta, the Wikipedias, and more),
fighting traditions, not-in-my-wiki inertia, personal tastes about logos,
the idea of "solving" problems by running away from them and planting seeds
for new problems elsewhere new and shiny... and also the idea already
mentioned here that mediawiki.org should be only for MediaWiki strict.
Since most of us want more users and more developers interested in our
technical projects, keeping our team pages in mediawiki.org helps more than
moving them elsewhere. If we want to keep things organized and even
slightly separated, categories and namespaces can do the work.
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