Topic on Talk:Technical communications/Dev wiki consolidation

In the risks section, it is admitted that splitting could be seen as a WMF-/non-WMF-break. So why not use dev.mediawiki.org (or somesuch) for the developer site? Appearances can be everything.

We want less wikis, no more...

Wikitech has a user login integrated with labs, Gerrit and maybe Bugzilla someday. For several reasons it is not the universal login shared across the Wikimedia family. Also for several reasons doesn't have the same MediaWiki version that is deployed to Wikimedia servers.

Having dev.mediawiki.org might be nicer (for some?) in the surface but still would require different login, different wiki. That would confuse people a lot more than the solution proposed.

Today we are asking contributors to

• Join wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
• File bugs at bugzilla.wikimedia.org
• Send patches to gerrit.wikimedia.org
• ... after getting developer access at wikitech.wikimedia.org

This situation is perceived as normal today, and I believe the proposed solution will be perceived as normal as well, as soon as we get over the initial reaction.

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

But why not rename the new wikitech.wikimedia.org to dev.mediawiki.org? It's just a DNS entry, right?

Because we're not just doing development here. We're doing operations work, running bots and tools, doing project planning etc. wikitech is more generic and as such encompasses all of that.

And I would still stick to the solution proposed below the line you quoted: That won't happen if the whole community of contributors (WMF or not) agrees to make Wikitech their new home. As said most of the current members have already a *.wikimedia.org account and I'm pretty sure things will be fine when the dust settles and we have a better plans thanks to all the feedback, and when we start moving pieces, nothing falls and we start experiencing the benefits of the new situation.

The problem with "appearances" is stronger with current community members with opinions about labels like "MediaWiki" or "Wikitech" than for the people out there. Most of the newcomers only know about "Wikipedia" anyway. For those willing to make a technical contribution, a label like "Wikitech" will sound just fine.

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

I don't know; I get alarm bells ringing. While I appreciate Ryan's point, it just says to me "we're going to be making a Wikimedia Operations site (wikitech) the MediaWiki development hub". Okay, so we don't actually *have* many upstream contribution from non-Wikimedian reusers, but this is surely this is (or at least appears) to be an admission of failure in that regard. What I liked about the original proposal was its potential to create a natural "MediaWiki development" site that was at least notionally not 100% WMF...

Actually, what I was saying was that we do a lot of non-mediawiki development, some of which is operations development. We currently must stick all of that project documentation on mediawiki.org, where it doesn't belong. In fact, Wikimedia's project planning doesn't really belong on mediawiki.org as a whole.

We already need to split our documentation between two wikis. wikitech is a good location for project planning and non-wikimedia development work. mediawiki.org would still be the place for documenting mediawiki, though (like api docs, extension docs, config options, configuration examples, etc.).

The difference being that, currently, only ops are affected by the docs split (they sometimes have to look on wikitech instead/too), for all the others "everything" is here. For user documentation of course it's worse because there's still a lot of friction and it's all scattered on Meta and hundreds of local wikis.

Except you're thinking from a very Wikimedia point of view. For third parties mediawiki.org is full of unrelated content that makes it harder to actually find MediaWiki documentation.

Why do you think the allegedly unrelated content makes it harder to find docs? It's very easy, docs should be only in Extension, Help and Manual namespaces. Sure, some don't respect namespace separation, but they'd respect wiki separation even less.

You started this thread pointing to an emotional reaction and I still think this is mostly a discussion driven by current contributors' emotions more than by the actual needs of users and developers. The fact is that finding or not finding the information you are looking for is a problem of content architecture and search tools. The role played by a domain name and a logo is secondary, especially if your website is a mess. And anyway the main risk is that users will end up first in an outdated answer at Stack Overflow or some obscure mailing list archive that Google decides to promote.

For the current discussion we could agree that a good solution could be designed and implemented at mediawiki.org, Wikitech, both or elsewhere. What we need to agree first is in the definition of the problem and the priorities to solve it. There is an Issue described. Do you agree or can you improve that description?

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