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

Mon May 25 10:01:32 UTC 2015

On 05/22/2015 04:36 PM, Greg Grossmeier wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I think it's reasonable for software development teams (*not* all 
teams) to be on MediaWiki.org, since it's the home wiki.

> 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 :)

Yes.  I would oppose putting it on Foundation Wiki, even if it's 
supposedly a team-only page.  There is definite overlap between 
technical pages and team pages.  See 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Collaboration/Team/Processes .

> [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.

It is also supposed to be for things that are WMF-specific (e.g. exactly 
which machines we have and what they do); this distinction (versus 
MediaWiki.org) dates from before Labs, but is not perfectly implemented.

Matt