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Meeting with Mozilla at Wikimania London

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MyM - MediaWiki Release Team
Meeting with Mozilla at Wikimania 2014, London
Report on Meeting Minutes and Outcomes


Earlier in the week, due to poor internet connection, the Wiki Working Group (WWG) for Mozilla's wiki worked in the London office for Mozilla. Mark Hershberger was able to meet with WWG a couple times during the week. Provided below is a summary of the meetings and outcomes.


Friday (8-August-2014), approximately 2pm, lasting 30 minutes


Mark Hershberger met with Christie Koehler (Mozilla employee charged with managing WWG) and Gordon (aka GPM, Mozilla volunteer). They discussed the following:

  • Current changes in Mozilla wiki's skin. The WWG plans on taking the stock Vector skin and adding css to keep their new skins simple to upgrade.
  • Purpose of advocate 3rd party is to understand their needs, issues, and how changes in MW will affect them and inform them that will affect them and what changes they could make.



Saturday (9-August-2014), approximately 11am, lasting 45 minutes


Mark Hershberger met with:

  • Christie Koehler
  • Gordon (GPM)
  • C (cliang@mozilla.com) -- Mozilla operations
  • Joelle—GNOME intern working at Mozilla


Based on earlier conversations about MetaMax's GSOC project on skinning, we discussed how skins are being separated out so that they are handled more like extensions in the next release. This will make maintaining their skin easier.


Mark asked for what they thought were the biggest issues and problems. They responded with the following items on which they would like work done:

  • Spam. They've implemented the ConfirmAccount extension and are working on creating a set of standards for accounts.
  • Skins.
  • Access Controls. They noted that people seem to think this is needed more than it really is. Some information must be kept private, but the actual things that need to be kept private are much more limited.
  • Real-Time Collaboration
    • It would be ideal to have something similar to the collaborative tools present in Google Docs for working on the wiki. They mentioned TogetherJS from Mozilla Labs, but Mark wasn't aware of the talk that afternoon that was to demonstrate TogetherJS. After the talk, the Mozilla WWG volunteered to start working on TogetherJS + MW integration on Mozilla's Wiki.
    • Having their work on a real wiki with a small group in addition to the user script that C. Scott Ananian presented on Wikipedia seems like a really positive development.
  • C mentioned that having a roadmap to help with planning would really help the Operations staff provide better environments for testing new features.
  • RedHat support. There are a lot of “corporate” RedHat users out there and Mozilla is one of them. Having RedHat packages for mediawiki, mediawiki extensions as well as parsoid and other services would help various organisations deploy MediaWiki quickly in a standard way.
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