[teampractices] Why are WMF Department/team pages on mediawiki.org?

Tue Jun 2 07:28:22 UTC 2015

Kevin Smith, 22/05/2015 18:12:
 > Having "one" place to go sounds good in theory, but at least as a
 > foundation employee I find myself bouncing between several wikis, so I
 > don't feel like we have achieved that.

Probably, killing the dozens of internal WMF wikis would go a long way 
to reduce the problem. It's not so difficult, if there is will.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/A_place_to_work_together

Kevin Smith, 22/05/2015 18:12:
> Both Editing[1] and Search & Discovery[2] have been criticized in their
> Discussion pages. Reading[3] doesn't have complaints yet, but is newer.

Non-confusing naming is important on any wiki with more than a few 
hundreds pages, not just on mediawiki.org. On Meta, such titles would 
probably redirect to help pages.

Speaking of which, this conversation seems to have forgotten 
documentation. Most of the time, WMF teams "forget" to create 
(translatable) help pages for their software, which is supposed to be 
available on mediawiki.org; as a result, people often have to resort to 
project descriptions or even status updates to get help. An example of 
completely undocumented feature is Echo; among the most used help pages 
we have Translate, VisualEditor and CirrusSearch.

Special:Search and Special:MovePage are two more things which are very 
easy within a wiki and very hard across wikis.

Nemo