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

Fri May 22 10:36:59 UTC 2015

cc'ing guillom who AIUI set up the Wikimedia engineering reporting.

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 3:14 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Naively, it seems like our home page should be on wikimediafoundation.org
> rather than mediawiki.org.
>

You're only talking about Team Practices Group
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group>?

For engineering departments, it is less clear, but since the entire
> "department" structure is an artifact of the WMF, and not of the mediawiki
> software, my gut reaction would be the same.
>

If there's a team working on a feature of MediaWiki, it's painful to make
people interested in that feature go off to another wiki to read about what
that team is doing. It's work to have to move pages from
otherwiki/Feature_name_team/Feature_planning to mediawiki.org/Feature_name.

The split usually occurs at Feature_name/Team subpage, and many teams are
pretty good at keeping process docs, team members, Team norms, etc. as
subpages of that subpage.

> Technical pages (such as CirrusSearch) make sense to be on mediawiki.org.
>
> Are there historical or cultural reasons to keep the team pages on
> mediawiki.org?
>

I'm not sure, Research has always had a strong presence on meta (but has
now set up mw:Wikimedia Research
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research>), and some Wikimedia
initiatives from 2011-2012 started out on meta.

Note that mediawiki.org holds an entire Engineering Teams infrastructure
that guillom and others developed, e.g. Template:Wikimedia engineering
project information
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Wikimedia_engineering_project_information>
and automatic roll-up of status reports. I imagine that its existence on
mediawiki.org for some teams pushed all engineering teams to set up pages
there. Now that we plan and report in Phabricator we need to update and
rethink that, it looks like Guillom has done a lot of work already (sample
<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Engineering_Community_Team&type=revision&diff=1506623&oldid=1495160>,
\o/). Since Team Practices Group doesn't directly work on MediaWiki
software, maybe there's now nothing keeping you on mw.org... but if you're
not careful you may get sucked into doing the work of reformatting Wikimedia
Engineering <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering>, Wikimedia
Platform Engineering
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering>, etc. :)

Cheers,
-- 
=S Page  WMF Tech writer
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