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

Fri May 22 16:12:39 UTC 2015

Thanks for the context!

S: Yes, my first sentence was meant to be TPG-specific. I lost that in
editing right before I hit "send".

Restricted access on mwfoundation is a pretty good argument for not going
there.

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.

It does seem like if the foundation is focused on the software, then having
all the teams on mediawiki would be reasonable. But since we do so much
non-software community work, and so much non-software technical work, meta
sounds appealing. Shifting from mw.o to meta would actually be moving
toward community, as opposed to splitting away from it. However, I have
spent almost no time on meta, so that's purely a snap response.

Currently, the Search & Discovery department is working on 3 projects:
Cirrus/text search, maps, and Wikidata Query Service. Of those, I think
only one is actually "mediawiki" work, which is part of what inspired my
question. The other part is that the TPG is starting to work with
non-Engineering teams within the foundation, and thus is working more and
more on non-mediawiki stuff. I suppose it depends on how broadly you define
"MediaWiki".

I was putting myself in the shoes of a non-foundation mediawiki developer.
Certainly I would care about Cirrus Search, but would I care about maps?
Would I care about the TPG? And, in fact, we have had pushback when naming
our new department pages in mediawiki. Both Editing[1] and Search &
Discovery[2] have been criticized in their Discussion pages. Reading[3]
doesn't have complaints yet, but is newer. That was what triggered my
thought that foundation/Editing makes a lot of sense, where
mediawiki/Editing might not.

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editing
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search_and_Discovery
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading

Kevin Smith
Agile Coach
Wikimedia Foundation

*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.*

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 7:36 AM, Greg Grossmeier <greg at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> <quote name="Kevin Smith" date="2015-05-21" time="15:14:25 -0700">
> > Naively, it seems like our home page should be on
> wikimediafoundation.org
> > rather than mediawiki.org.
>
> The org-specific pages are on wikimediafoundation (staff pages, job
> postings etc).
>
> > 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.
>
> Remember which came first. It wasn't the Foundation. ;)
>
> > 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?
>
> For me, mostly due to keeping things in one[0] place. It's easier
> mentally to keep team pages and project pages (where project pages are
> more sensibly on mw.org) together since our teams are heavily
> technical/based on MediaWiki development.
>
> Also, it is cultural because if we put a lot of stuff on the foundation
> wiki then we explicitly divide ourselves and our projects from the rest
> of the community. This is not a long term positive step to take :)
>
> Greg
>
> [0] Yes, we also have some technical documentation on wikitech wiki, but
> that is mostly due to 2 reasons. 1) a controlled wiki for the management
> of WMF Labs users and 2) a separate wiki (hosted on different hardware)
> that will not inherently go down if the rest of the wikis go down.
>
> --
> | Greg Grossmeier            GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
> | identi.ca: @greg                A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
>
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