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Topic on Talk:Technical Advice IRC Meeting

Proposal for meeting on use-cases at specfic Wikis...

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ShakespeareFan00 (talkcontribs)

I'd like to request that at some future date a meeting is scheduled to deal with techncial advice/development issues arising out of use-cases on specific wiki.

In my instance , this would be Wikisource, that as it uses LST/Proofread page extensively has some technical areas which are not necessarily applicable to other Wikimedia wikis.

WikiData is another wiki that does some technical things very differently from sites like Wikipedia or Wikiversity for example.

I hope that this proposal is considered.

Elitre (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Hi! I'm not involved with the people organising this meeting, but am curious :) In the Wikidata case, there are quarterly meetings happening already (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Events#IRC_office_hours ), so is your suggestion to make one of those entirely centered around a specific community use case? If so, maybe reaching out directly to the organisers of those could help. There's also a lot of other meetings being organized, that are usually listed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours , that you can join and/or ask whether those could accommodate your request, if the organisers agree with you.

Birgit Müller (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

Hi @ShakespeareFan00, that's a good idea! As for Wikidata, this could be organised very easily, as one of the people also working on Wikidata is already hosting the Technical Advice IRC meeting. On the other hand I think there are already plenty opportunitys for people who want to build tools and other stuff for Wikidata to get advice from Wikidata devs or others, thereas I'm not aware of anything similar for Wikisource. Do you have a guess for how many developers around Wikisource a special office hour could be interesting? On our side, I would need to discuss this idea with my colleagues first, but I definitely think it's worth thinking about it more.

The IRC meetings Elitre mentioned above are mostly "state of art" meetings with focus on a specific product or corner of Mediawiki & seldom offers for volunteer devs and their projects. So it's probably not what you're looking for (if I understood you correctly), but still maybe worth to check if there is something that's interesting for you, too.

ShakespeareFan00 (talkcontribs)

I'm not sure, but a concern has been expressed in the past that certain development efforts had been focused on Wikipedia related functionality, as opposed to "other projects". I am not aware how many active developers there are for Wikisource related things, but I (not a developer) had filed a number of Phab tickets that got (not always favourable) responses, related to issues I'd run into with Wikisource related use cases.

A few of the issues at Wikisource , would not arise at Wikipedia, because it doesn't try to do somethings that are encountered more often on Wikisource. One issue I encountered was that currently ProofreadPage's managment strategy for tracking things directly in page text isn't ideal. A technical meeting focusing on Wikisource would enable the relevant concerns to be expressed to developers, and a "better" content model developed.

I have some other related "ehanchements" related to Wikisource that I'd also like to talk with Mediawiki/Wikimedia developers about. Like for example, it's not currently straightforward to pull content such as quote directly from page text cross-wiki. Wikisource supports LST internally between Wikisources, but not necesarily with other Wikis. (Aside: Also being able to use certain templates cross-wiki would be immensely useful beyond wikisource. It would mean that certain projects could pull a template from say Commons without needing to have a local copy, even if the media was still locally hosted on a specfic project)~~~~

Birgit Müller (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

Ah, okay, sorry I misunderstood you! Well, for this kind of request the Technical Advice IRC meeting wouldn't be the right place, as the goal of the meeting is to support volunteer developers who have questions around their own projects. But you could discuss your idea with the Wikisource Community, and then ask at m:IRC_office_hours or on Wikitech-L if someone would like to organize such a session. Best, Birgit