[Wikimedia-l] Proposal to use the internal wiki more

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Michael Peel <michael.peel at wikimedia.org.uk
> wrote:

>
>
> On 3 Apr 2013, at 19:46, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > On 3 April 2013 03:34, Michael Peel <michael.peel at wikimedia.org.uk>
> wrote:
> >> So, rather than close the internal wiki, I'd like to propose a radical
> redesign and repurposing of it. Is there the interest and willingness in
> the WMF and the chapters to share such information with each other?
> >
> > I'd argue against this. From the perspective of the Wikimedia
> > Foundation, I would rather staff bias towards putting information on
> > public wikis wherever possible, and I'd worry that staff energy going
> > into updating a closed private wiki would by necessity pull focus from
> > public work. I'd argue for closing both the internal wiki and the
> > internal mailing list: IMO there's nothing on either that needs to be
> > confidential.
>
> Would you be willing to close down the WMF office wiki and list at the
> same time, then?
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
> (From mobile)
>

You're being snarky, but I am going to take this as a good-faith
question....

I have access to the office wiki, left-over from being a board member,
though I do not edit there and have only accessed it a couple of times over
the years. I think I can safely say without violating confidentiality that
it is mainly used as a tool to run a discrete, physical, boring office. It
is where you will find things like staff phone numbers, info on the
employee health plans, how to send to the office printers, and how to
submit an expense report.

As on internal, there's also lots of outdated stuff, like old notes from
2008 staff meetings; there are scratchpad idea pages that probably could be
elsewhere, and there are some pages about department functions and project
drafts that I'm sure no one would mind being on meta, but much of the
interesting stuff is public (the annual plan, the communications calendar),
and as far as I can see with a quick scan there are not large-scale
discussions happening there.

So, back to the start of the thread: using a wiki effectively does seem
like a scoping question, yes, and I think internal (and any other
internal/private wiki) would benefit from specific scoping like Mike
proposes; his suggestions seem reasonable to me. I think I can also say
without violating confidentiality that almost all of the mail to the
internal list in the last few months has not been discussion focused, but
rather has been notices of chapter board elections, meetings and reports,
and I would love to see all that traffic be public (even if it's on a
separate list so not everyone has to get the notices if they're not
interested) -- there's nothing inherently confidential about it, and it
would be nice for that info to be easily findable.

-- phoebe