IMO both QRpedia and the wmuk wiki could be hosted on WMF infrastructure in
one way or another.
The was an email a few weeks or months ago regarding access to the wiki for
volunteers on the server side to help improve the situation, but it doesn't
seem much really happened after that.
If WMUK want help with any of the above then I and others on this list are
here and ready to help and also waving our arms around.
But WMUK needs to start the process.
I guess there are privacy elements (GDPR) and what not that need to be
considered.
On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, 12:37 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com
wrote:
On 01 December 2018 at 09:30 Jonathan Cardy <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
More radically, you could move the UK wiki to be a project on Meta.
<snip>
I can’t think of anything we have ever gained from having our own
independent Wiki as opposed to a project on Meta, unless you count
independence and seperation from the rest of the movement as a positive.
As a matter of history, independence was a big motivation, rightly or
wrongly.
There is fundraising to consider, naturally. There is more than that one
wiki hosted, even in terms of MediaWiki instances.
In terms of fundraising, I spoke in 2010 (as WMUK staff) to someone then
working in online fundraising as CE of a charity. Who told me that
Wikimedia as a whole undershot what could be done in terms of raising
funds, by an order of magnitude; and that you had to cater for the needs of
the savvy donor, who researches charities online. The point is obviously
not to rely entirely on impulse giving.
Now, that cannot be done on meta, clearly.
Does there need to be a wiki involved? There an element here of business
logic versus open logic. Certainly one argument is "a report on the
charity's activities is under professional control, and that is what should
be online". A counter-argument is that it would convey nothing distinctive,
everyone knows that glossiness can be purchased, and the WMF set its face
some time ago against the plusher models of charity and NGO development.
A colleague told me not long ago that the trend for corporate sites is to
make them leaner. The rationale is that people will anyway use other
sources of information about corporation C, researching it elsewhere. Part
of this discussion should be whether that would actually be a good thing
for chapter's comms. There is a familiar debate here about who are the
stakeholders and so on, and honestly anyone who brings up rationalising the
wiki out of existence really needs to have their own version of that to
hand.
Actually the UK wiki seems to me to have suffered from a couple of things.
These really shouldn't have to be spelled out. They are:
(a) That it has been treated as an appendage to the office system; and
(b) A division of labour that is familiar from WP, that everyone should
muck in on the scutwork, some people develop substantive content, and
others do maintenance work like tagging with templates and effectively
archiving old content, has not been understood by the office. And that none
of this should be confused with the developer time cost, though there is
certainly a cost to not having the site run like a dog and suffering
periods of downtime.
For heaven's sake, a way to engage volunteers familiar with wiki editing
is to have a wiki they'd want to edit. Not some sort of obsolescent filing
cabinet. In these terms, beware the stakeholder analysis that simply
ignores the group of people who, wait for it, actually write Wikipedia.
Charles
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia UK mailing list
wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
WMUK:
https://wikimedia.org.uk