MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group/Annual Report 2016

Focus Areas

In 2016, we focused mainly on these areas:

• Continuation and improvement of MediaWiki user experience. We are striving to keep user experience of MediaWiki as consistent and integrated as possible for self-installed MediaWiki instances (see output).
• Exchange of experience among stakeholders, i.e. primarily people running MediaWiki as their platform. This was done in regular online and offline meetings as well as through our online platform at mwstake.org.
• WikiApiary. We took over maintenance of one major existing platform to gather usage statistics for MediaWiki instances and continued to support its editing community.
• Incorporation. Though we are not incorporated yet, becoming a legal entity is vital to achieving our goals. We have made great steps by clarifying the place and form of incorporation.
• Building a MediaWiki organisation. We explored the idea of creating a MediaWiki organisation and the path towards this goal.

Output

• High level information about MediaWiki: 9 Blog articles
• Various extensions have been created and improved by MWStake members to make MediaWiki easier for 3rd parties to use:
  • HitCounters restores functionality removed from MediaWiki core and provides it for other extensions that rely on the data.
  • MediaWiki Git Remote to import/export MediaWiki content via git. See also Marks talk at CPOSC
  • LdapGroups to synchronize groups from LDAP and MediaWiki
  • PluggableAuth provides a framework for creating authentication and authorization extensions.
  • BlueSpiceSMWConnector enables other extensions to add data to Semantic MediaWiki
  • Members of the group participated in the development of the new epub export feature on MediaWiki
• In 2016 the group took over management of WikiApiary, a community-lead effort to gather statistics about MediaWiki usage.

Exchange of Experience

Real Life Meetings

These meetings are used to discuss current issues of MediaWiki and of the Stakeholders' group with a wider audience. They are generally open to the public, thus reaching out to potential new members for the group.

• 4 January 2016 at Developer Summit, San Francisco
• 2 April 2016 at Jerusalem Hackathon, Jerusalem
• 23 April 2016 at Wikimedia Conference, Berlin
• 26 May 2016 at Enterprise MediaWiki Conference, New York
• 25 June 2016 at Wikimania, Esino Lario
• 28 September 2016 at Semantic MediaWiki Conference, Frankfurt

Online Meetings

• 10 regular telcos (Hangouts/BlueJeans), all documented

Outreach

Real Life

In 2016, we actively participated in various MediaWiki and Open Source conferences, among others with these topics:

• Developers' Summit 2016 - MediaWiki governance
• Wikimedia Conference - Experiences with our survey, ideas on a MediaWiki organisation.
• Jerusalem Hackathon - Translating technical documentation, Improve navigation for extension developers
• EMWCon Spring 2016 - discussion about a MediaWiki organisation, actual use case
• Wikimania Esino Lario - Thoughts on MediaWiki governance, Extension Manager, MW git, and others
• SMWCon Fall 2016 Frankfurt - Application prototyping as a use case for MediaWiki, MediaWiki git, actual use case

Online

Participation in discussions on 3rd party relevant topics

• Office hours
• Discussions in Phabricator

Financials

• In 2016 we raised no money and we spent no money.