Talk:BarebonesMediaWiki

Thanks for writing this proposal. I think for microsites in general, the following issues have to be considered:

• discoverability decreases and maintenance cost increases the more individually configured sites there are;
• community participation tends to be inherently more difficult with new wikis.

Therefore I think any individual new site proposed has to be judged on its merits, and UX is only one consideration driving the acceptance of a specific proposal for a new site. With regard to specific features needed for such a microsite framework, I think translation is easily the most complex one. The proposal seems to dilute the distinction between page translation (pages in the wiki) vs. software localization. The latter is indeed handled by TranslateWiki, while the former is typically handled by uses of the Translate extension in a specific wiki.

I'm not aware of any workflow that makes it easy to translate pages in a public community wiki while publishing them to a less public wiki. It's possible that fundraising has optimized these workflows already. I suggest contacting Language Engineering and Fundraising about this aspect in particular.

In general, I would recommend identifying a first microsite to try this with, and more clearly defining who the recommended implementers for the proposal are.--Eloquence (talk) 22:40, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

I agree with identifying a first microsite, given that the two concrete examples (donate and SOPA banner) were trivial to implement without the need for a BarebonesMediaWiki. And SOPA was a complete one-off, so finding ways to duplicate it doesn't seem like a priority.

For documents such as the wmf:Annual Report, it'd be helpful if you could identify problems with the PDF and/or wiki version, particularly those that would be large enough to warrant someone taking extra time to create a third version (because we'd then have PDF, wiki, bare-wiki versions).

Broadly, a bit of CSS can handle nearly any use-case, I think. I'm not sure what else is needed here. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:14, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

As Heather's edit may have since clarified, the Annual Report example wasn't really born out of the production and planning of the actual WMF annual reports, but instead appears to have come out of some forward thinking by the proposal's authors. Which is fine of course. But I would be happy to answer questions about the production of these dual PDF/wiki versions, base the experience with recent annual reports.

I think it will become easier for knowledgeable people to support this project with ideas and advice once the underlying purposes are specified more clearly. For example, spelling out the differences between the audiences of these microsites and of the regular Wikimedia projects, which motivate these changes (e.g. the hiding of navigation elements). Then it would also be interesting to look at further existing examples, say the website of Wikimedia Germany which has hidden basically all the navigation chrome of MediaWiki, and added non-standard elements, and find out how they did this (Special:Version says that the wiki uses e.g. the Widgets and HTMLets extensions). That example also raises the question of whether one just wants to hide pages such as Recentchanges - in the sense of removing links to them - or completely remove them from public view, as in this case. Regarding the second question ("Can we prohibit editing of site and/or give a select few access to edit?"), a look at the setup of the Foundation's own site might be useful.

Lastly, I think that basing the proposal on MediaWiki makes good sense - if only for reasons of maintainability. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 03:55, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

re: Some Questions

You should probably look at our skinning and user rights interfaces… Most of this page (at least most of the "core" stuff) can already be done with a plain MediaWiki installation, and only a very little bit of it would need new or improved extensions. Peachey88 (talk)

Include at Architecture Summit?

Hello, should this proposal be discussed at the Architecture Summit in late January? Drdee (talk) 08:17, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Agree, shouldn't this be moved to the sub-RFC page? --Yurik (talk) 23:58, 21 January 2014 (UTC)