On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 3:06 PM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
The best way to approach a project like this is not to propose an up-front migration of an entire wiki to a new piece of software, just to prototype a few new features.
I think the potential migration of content to wikitech and the potential use of certain MW extensions to improve the user experience are legitimately separate issues.
If the migration is merited, it is likely merited irrespective of whether we use SocialProfile, LQT, SMW, SMF, etc. We could perform a large migration of content without using any of them, or we could experiment with these extensions without/before migrating any content.
I'm ambivalent about the migration of content. I'm not very fond of the current division between dev-ops contributors (wikitech) and everything else (mediawiki.org), which reinforces barriers between the two worlds. Those are the barriers that Labs was designed to tear down, empowering technical contributors to prototype their changes easily, and to get them ready for large-scale usage on Wikimedia or other production sites.
Having all technical contributors directed to wikitech.wikimedia.org would address that - it would introduce them to a magical world of dev-ops unicorns and PHP rainbows at the same time. And having mediawiki.org more clearly dedicated to the product would allow it to shine more brightly in its own sunflower-y colors.
At the same time, the amount of wiki-ping-pong we're playing with technically interested users could very well increase significantly as a result. Right now, wikitech.wikimedia.org is relatively quiet, with changes typically either being made by the Wikimedia ops team or by Labs users.
It simply stands to reason that if we distribute a lot of content from a large wiki to a much smaller one, the number of times that you'll have to go back and forth between the two to find what you're looking for will increase. API docs? Over here. Status update? Over there. Extension installation docs? Over here. Specs related to the same extension? Over there. Ping, pong. Ping, pong. The divisions may seem logical to us, but for the confused technical contributor, things could easily get a lot worse.
If feasible, I would at the end of the day still argue in favor of a single consolidated technical wiki. I realize calling that wiki mediawiki.org is not ideal, but beyond the domain name, a lot can be done to provide reasonable divisions (namespaces, navigation, etc.), so that MediaWiki the product and other Wikimedia technical projects and processes are clearly distinct. Let's also not forget that we'll have future potential for new MediaWiki-related technical contribution that actually would fit very nicely under the mediawiki.org umbrella (e.g. Lua script repository, gadget repository).
If we do go forward with the migration to wikitech.wikimedia.org, I would argue in favor of largely depleting mediawiki.org of content except for clearly necessary end user documentation and support pages, to minimize ping pong effects.
Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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