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

[Greg Grossmeier]

<quote name="Kevin Smith" date="2015-05-21" time="15:14:25 -0700">
> Naively, it seems like our home page should be on wikimediafoundation.org
> rather than mediawiki.org.

The org-specific pages are on wikimediafoundation (staff pages, job
postings etc).

> For engineering departments, it is less clear, but since the entire
> "department" structure is an artifact of the WMF, and not of the mediawiki
> software, my gut reaction would be the same.

Remember which came first. It wasn't the Foundation. ;)

> Technical pages (such as CirrusSearch) make sense to be on mediawiki.org.
> 
> Are there historical or cultural reasons to keep the team pages on
> mediawiki.org?

For me, mostly due to keeping things in one[0] place. It's easier
mentally to keep team pages and project pages (where project pages are
more sensibly on mw.org) together since our teams are heavily
technical/based on MediaWiki development.

Also, it is cultural because if we put a lot of stuff on the foundation
wiki then we explicitly divide ourselves and our projects from the rest
of the community. This is not a long term positive step to take :)

Greg

[0] Yes, we also have some technical documentation on wikitech wiki, but
that is mostly due to 2 reasons. 1) a controlled wiki for the management
of WMF Labs users and 2) a separate wiki (hosted on different hardware)
that will not inherently go down if the rest of the wikis go down.

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