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

[Guillaume Paumier]

Hi,

[I see that Kevin has responded to say that his original question was about 
the Team Practices pages specifically, but since the scope of this thread has 
expanded beyond that, and since I'm almost done writing this, I'm going to 
send it :) ]

The short version is:
* There are historical reasons for having those pages on mediawiki.org.
* Many of those reasons don't apply any more.
* We need to distinguish between team pages (and process documentation), and 
project/feature documentation.
* mediawiki.org is the right place for documentation about MediaWiki 
extensions and features.
* Meta is a better place for team pages & process documentation.

Keep reading for the longer version :)

Le vendredi 22 mai 2015, 03:36:59 S Page a écrit :
> cc'ing guillom who AIUI set up the Wikimedia engineering reporting.

Back in 2010, RobLa started a process to audit our engineering development 
practices and processes: 
https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Archive:EPM_Process_and_Tools

One of his recommendations was to create "project pages" for WMF engineering 
projects, to improve consistency between projects, to improve the execution 
process, and to facilitate transparency and reporting:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Development_process_improvement/2010_Q3_plan

A few months later, I was tasked with organizing and maintaining a system to 
do just that. At the time, we didn't have Lua, so I created a system of 
intricate (and fragile) templates to automate this as much as possible. This 
is what allowed us to have project infoboxes, status subpages, monthly reports 
based on transclusion, etc.

When we create project pages in 2010-2011, people started creating team pages 
on mediawiki.org, because that's where most of their work was happening. It 
then became the norm for engineering groups, and thanks to the transclusion 
system we were able to set up "team hubs", i.e. pages that listed the team 
members as well as the current projects and their status.

There have always been doubts about whether mediawiki.org was the right place 
for project documentation; it made sense for some projects directly related to 
MediaWiki (e.g. ArticleFeedback), but not for others (e.g. the annual 
fundraiser). In the end, we kept things there because of the reasons already 
given in this thread: inertia, the fact that we wanted to stay close to 
volunteers, and the fact that we wanted to keep things in as few different 
places as possible. Our "internal stuff" was "tolerated" by the mediawiki.org 
community because there wasn't really a better solution under the constraints 
we had.

Most of that system became obsolete when we moved our project management 
processes to Phabricator last year, and when we replaced the monthly 
engineering report by quarterly reviews. A few months ago, I wrapped up the 
transition by retiring most of those complex templates, and basically freezing 
all the content in time for archiving purposes:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94180

Now that much has moved to Phabricator (including the roadmap) or elsewhere 
(the reports), I don't see a compelling reason to keep team pages on 
mediawiki.org. mediawiki.org has always aimed to be a place to document the 
MediaWiki software, and we now have an opportunity to return to that narrower 
scope. Extension pages, feature documentation, etc. should be hosted there; 
team pages, photo galleries, etc. however don't really need to be there any 
more. Meta-Wiki is a better place for "internal WMF stuff" that don't need to 
be private (i.e. on the office wiki) or editing-restricted (i.e. on 
wikimediafoundation.org).

I hope this helps; I'm happy to continue the discussion to share historical 
knowledge, answer questions, or help organize pages on Meta.

-- 
Guillaume Paumier