EMWCon Spring 2019/Panel Questions

This page is a working draft of questions and talking points to prompt discussion from the panelists. Please feel free to add to the list.

Begin with introductions

1. What is your background?
   • Do you like working with wikis and what do you use wikis for at work?
   • What other competing software do you work with?
2. Have you had any experience looking at the market recently and do you have direct experience making choices between products for your organization(s)?
   • Was it recent or a long time ago?
   • Can you recount how the choice was made? Was it difficult getting approval? What else was considered?
3. Where does MediaWiki fit in the enterprise software market?
   • What popular enterprise software is it directly competing with?
4. There seems to be lots of wiki options (Confluence, Jive, Sharepoint, ...). Is the MediaWiki developer community actually competing with these (in order to increase the customer base) or are they content developing for their own use cases?
5. Even within the MediaWiki community, there are lots of bundles like Dokit, BlueSpice, semantic::core, Meza, etc. Does this hurt Mediawiki's chances of becoming a "household name" in enterprise software?
6. From a typical top-down approach, how does the acquisition and implementation of MediaWiki differ from more popular software?
7. What support do common enterprise packages provide and how does MediaWiki fall short? How does a company get support for MediaWiki?
8. Why is MediaWiki not a viable platform for enterprise organizations?
9. What features do popular enterprise tools provide that prevent MediaWiki from being chosen?
10. How would one track issues in MediaWiki? I see Confluence and Sharing have integrations with issue tools.
11. What changes and new features for MediaWiki desired by enterprise users also suit the needs of the Wikipedia projects?
    • What changes and new features for MediaWiki desired by enterprise users conflict with the needs of the Wikipedia projects?
12. If MediaWiki was produced by a for-profit company, I would never see a return on investing money in that company. Change my mind.
13. If the WMF's mission is to support the Wikipedia sites and not necessarily the software (MediaWiki), there is no direct rationale to spend foundation resources on development supporting "third party" use cases. One can argue that supporting "third parties" improves the community relationship, making it more likely for "third party" developers to contribute back to the core software and to extend MediaWiki's functionality. But ultimately the software is there to support an open-Internet system focused on past events leveraging crowd moderation at scales a business cannot follow.
    • Why should companies invest in software that is not designed to be used in a corporate environment?
    • What could our "third party" community do (specifically) to increase the awareness and reception of MediaWiki as a serious enterprise tool?
14. Could the WMF (and the contingent of volunteer developers) be convinced to formally prioritize the software as a product? Would a paid-for support model from the developer community actually make MediaWiki more likely to be considered in the enterprise market?
15. What would it take for large-scale MediaWiki users to invest into core development?