[Labs-l] Giving some attention to the wikitech.wikimedia.org wiki

Tue Jan 12 22:45:49 UTC 2016

(cross-posted to labs-l and wikitech-l)

I've been thinking quite a bit about Tool Labs developers over the
past couple of months. Last week I was in San Francisco for the
Wikimedia Developer Summit and had an opportunity to talk to a number
of people about some of my ideas. One of them that got a pretty good
reception was a few proposed changes to the wikitech.wikimedia.org
wiki.

I've started "Make wikitech more friendly for the multiple audiences
it supports" phab task [0] and started adding blocker tasks for
various ideas that have come up in the discussions. One is to enable a
"Portal" namespace on wikitech [1] to be used to make landing pages
for different audiences. Another is to add a "Tool" namespace [2] that
the various Tool Labs projects could use to document their projects. A
third is to disable searching "Nova resource" pages by default [3].

The wikitech wiki doesn't currently have what anyone would consider an
active on-wiki community to seek consensus from on topics like this so
I am reaching out to what I hope are relevant mailing lists to gather
feedback. Discussion of why any of these ideas is a great or horrible
idea is welcome here on list or possibly even better on the
phabricator tasks themselves. Again since we don't have a strong
social norm for when consensus has been reached for this wiki I'm
going to arbitrarily suggest that discussion remain open until
2016-01-20 after which time I will take further steps to have the new
namespaces enabled (or got back to the drawing board if the concept is
rejected).

[0]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123425
[1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123427
[2]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123429
[3]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T122993

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855