Talk:Mailing lists/Flow

Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at Talk:Mailing lists/LQT Archive 1 on 2015-07-10.

Why can't this page be merged to a section of m:Mailing lists/Overview? It's very confusing to have duplicate content.

Merged or clearly split and linked? Please open a bug report to discuss and resolve properly. This sounds like a good microtask for the Outreach Program for Women.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Merged and redirected. The discussion is best held on wiki, IMHO.

OK. I agree on the need to avoid useless duplication but some thoughts:

• There is a risk of loosing people when forwarding to that long page with all kinds of lists. We should at least keep all the technical lists together. That is already the case, but i.e. mobile-l is listed elsewhere in meta.
• This mw page actually contains more information and is better formated. Do we really want to loose this? Would it be ok to move the nice formatted content there, and then hope that the rest of lists would catch up?
• There is something to be said about the usefulness of mediawiki.org being a self-contained site, especially for those interested in their own MediaWiki instances not related to the Wikimedia movement (apart from the software being used). Maybe we could still keep the details of mediawiki-l and perhaps a few more selected lists, and then link to meta for all the rest?

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

This page is very deliberately NOT a list of all WMF-related mailing lists. It is very specifically a list of mailing lists related to the development or support of MediaWiki, its extensions and any other general MW-related topics (e.g. general-purpose bots). It is targeted at people who want to get involved with MediaWiki development or get help or information relating to MW.

This should be clear from the introduction. If it is not, then it should be reworded.

There already appears to be some feature creep, with some lists that look suspiciously WMF-specific being listed here (wikitech-ambassadors and analytics being two that jump out at me), though as I haven't looked into them it may be that they are more general than they at first appear.

I agree with all Qgil's points, and would like to add that the reason this page was originally created was because the page on meta was (a) horrible to look at; (b) horrible to navigate; and (c) very difficult to find the wheat (MW-related channels of communication) amongst the chaff (WMF-specific channels) - something which has only got harder as time has gone on.

I urge very very strongly for this page to be kept, with its current intent. If people feel that the duplication is a problem, then my suggestion would be to remove MW-specific links from the page on meta, and add a link/notice saying that mailing lists related to MediaWiki development and support are listed here.

HappyDog, what you call "feature creep" is the very reason why it's hard to tell the line between the two pages.

Qgil, there would be no problem in keeping all the stuff currently listed on this page in the same section on Meta and to also keep the templates.

Both: keeping only the main lists here, i.e. those of interest for MediaWiki users who are not developers or – more in general – Wikimedians, and remove them from the Meta list, is also an option. They would be mediawiki-l, mediawiki-announce and mediawiki-api-announce or the whole first section at most, right? However, IMHO it would all be more self-contained if there was only a single page on Meta and we could link it e.g. from the sidebar.

As agreed, I moved all the mailing except the strictly MediaWiki-only ones to the Meta page; only two were missing there, a clear sign of confusing overlap.

I kept the same template and table format as here, although tt was quite painful because I had to merge all the information which was only on the Meta page and not in the rows here (in particular, Gmane links). I don't think the rest of the Meta page will be converted to this format, which takes much more space, but it doesn't harm much to have a section with a different format. Unless you feel strongly about it, I'd remove the admin column: the list is already on the page of each ML and it takes a lot of space on wiki.

Now a useful thing to do would be adding links to the Gmane archives where still missing.

mediawiki-india is a mediawiki* list and therefore makes sense to have it listed in mediawiki.org. We don't have other mediawiki* lists and we don't expect many to follow. Please accept it here as well.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Actually there's plenty of mediawiki-* lists; you're right however that the only one similar to mediawiki-india is perhaps mediawiki-sv, which is closed, so an exception could make sense (feel free to rollback me).

Wouldn't it be easier to reorganise the rows in the Meta page, possibly adding new subsections, if one wants to give more visibility to this list (and others)? I don't see it on Gmane, by the way.

Not sure I like what's happened here. This page is now misleading, and effectively hides the non-support lists from view. The implication is that these are the MW-related lists, whilst in fact there are many others that would be of interest to the general (non-WMF) public. In particular things like mediawiki-enterprise, which is completely orthogonal to WMF use-cases.

My firm belief is that this page should be largely reverted, and should remain the primary list of MW-related mailing lists. The page on meta should be updated so the 'MediaWiki and technical' section lists all WMF-specific technical mailing lists, such as for toolserver, stats, etc. and then has a prominent link to the MW page saying "For mailing lists related to the development/use of MediaWiki - the software that powers most WMF projects - see the mailing lists page on mediawiki.org.

Most of the lists there are "of interest to the general (non-WMF) public", except the projects lists...

HappyDog, I was hoping for some suggestions from you on how to resort stuff, but I did it on my own now: I split "MediaWiki and technical" in three.

1. "MediaWiki" first, with lists "strictly suitable (also) for a general, non-Wikimedia-only audience", first those for a general/mixed audience, then "Code and bugs" for code geeks, then "Local". These are probably the most important lists also for wikimedians (API, i18n, wikitext... nobody cares about it more than wikimedians) but non-Wikimedians won't feel strangers.
2. "Related software, tools and infrastructure" are useful for third parties too (especially dumps?), but in practice mostly used by and for Wikimedia projects.
3. "General development and technical discussion", including the "Interest areas", are the lists dominated by wikimedian discussions. Here a non-Wikimedian can often feel out of place, but they often are the main development force for MediaWiki in general.

I've also changed the subject page here to link the first section directly: is it clearer now? I think it is, and it's a big improvement for the "general (non-WMF) public" compared to the previous situation, where the items of interest for it where inextricably mixed with mostly-Wikimedia or Wikimedia-only stuff.

Just a technical question to figure out possibilities. Does interwiki transclusion work? It could be a possibility, if feasible.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Not on Wikimedia wikis. It has performance/cache issues or something like that.

See Manual:$wgEnableScaryTranscluding.

Maybe I missed something, but I have yet to find a good way to search the archives of a list. When doing research I commonly want to read all the old messages and grep through them. So I wrote this little bash script:

#!/bin/bash

_URL="http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/"

if test -n "$( find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.txt' -print -quit )"
then
        echo 'Deleting old archives...'
        rm *.txt
fi

for _GZIP_FILE in $( wget --quiet -O - $_URL | perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /href="(\d{4}[^"]+\.gz)"/g;' )
do
        echo "Fetching $_GZIP_FILE..."
        wget --quiet "${_URL}${_GZIP_FILE}"
        gunzip $_GZIP_FILE
done

Create a new folder, put this script it there and then run it. Might be useful to somebody else...

Assuming you're speaking of mailman mailing lists, you can just download the whole archive in mbox format. Look for mailman docs.

OMG, so much easier. Found this, and it worked for me:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/private/mediawiki-l.mbox/mediawiki-l.mbox?username=____________ 

Thanks!

Starting a new discussion based on the current status after Nemo's merge.

I think the changes are good progress but after some days I still feel we are not done with the right solution.

What about this principle: if a mailing list has "mediawiki" in its name it must be listed here. Otherwise goes to meta:Mailing lists/Overview.

The inverse happens at meta, and meta:Mailing_lists/Overview#MediaWiki should have simply a link to this page. Note that under the MediaWiki section in meta there are some lists that are not *mediawiki*. They should stay in Meta.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Most of the mediawiki-i18n audience is on Meta, for instance; mediawiki-distributors, mediawiki-enterprise are also not really "MediaWiki things", but rather external/wikimedian efforts about MediaWiki; moreover, mediawiki-commits should be on the same page as wikitech-l etc. In short, I agree that the lists there could be resorted, but all those lists are relevant on Meta, while it's dubious if they are here.

mediawiki-commits sounds like an obvious list to be mentioned here, where the MediaWiki software is developed...

And about wikitech-l... The trusth is that if you are interested in getting involved in the MediaWiki community that is the list you need to join.

About mediawiki-distributors and mediawiki-enterprise... Isn't the other way around? They are really MediaWiki specific and no Wikimedia related (in the sense of dealing with Wikimedia projects content or processes).

I don't have a strong opinion about these lists being listed at Meta, but I do believe they should be readable ere without requiring the extra step that might never come (most people are lazy / have little time).

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

I still don't understand what the "extra step" is. If it's the additional click, then replace the link in the sidebar.

? Replacing a link in he sidebar still would leave the MediaWiki lists mentioned one click away, right?

I think the problem is of perspective. You seem to be seeing this problem from the point of view of an experienced MediaWiki user knowing what you are looking for and happy to jump seamlessly to different websites within the Wikimedia family e.g. Meta.

Now look at the same situation from the point of view of someone new at mediawiki.org willing to learn more. This user will probably find Communication, where mediawiki-l is proposed, or will find Mailing lists directly where two more lists are listed. The user might see the "Interwiki redirect - This page can be found at..." and understand or not what it means, feel compelled to click or just go for another mediawiki.org tab open. If that user clicks, will land in a very different context and she might oe might not be happy about it.

Again, for a user sure about what she is looking for all this is no big deal, but probably many users have a mild interest, little time and plenty of new data in front of their noses when they dive for the first time to mediawiki.org.

Can you please comment on the lists mentioned above? Especially wikitech-l, which is in fact the list where most MediaWiki action happens and where there is a good balance between MediaWiki and Wikimedia tech topics. I think it is our interest to promote that list to mediawiki.org newcomers. About the other two, I still think they are purely MediaWiki centric and could be listed here, instead of sending MediaWiki 3rd party users to no less than Meta.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

One click away from what? The sidebar can link m:Mailing_lists/Overview#MediaWiki directly. Note that wikitech-l was the first list there but I moved that section down because you asked mediawiki-* lists to have more visibility, but again: please do reorganize items yourself as you prefer.

I don't expect many people to arrive here from links on other pages, but incoming links can easily be fixed to point to Meta as well. Sure, it would be better if we could disable $wgDisableHardRedirects, maybe a feature request to allow whitelisting should be filed.

I also disagree on your characterisation about "the point of view of an experienced MediaWiki user": no matter where, if it's on a wiki I'll find it; on the contrary, normal people are very confused by similar information being scattered and split across several slightly different locations. And no, I don't think going to Meta is a problem for any non-Wikimedian; usually they don't even notice they're on Meta (or any other wiki) rather than, say, Wikipedia.

Quim, I think the one addition I'd strongly propose for this list is wikitech-l - you ok with that?

wikitech-l added.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.