On Tuesday, April 2, 2013 at 5:45 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
> I have been drafting a proposal to attract new contributors, help them > settle in, and connect them to interesting tasks. It turns out that many > of these problems are not unique to new contributors. We suffer them as > well and we are just used to them. > > The proposal has evolved into a deeper restructuring of our community > spaces. We're still drafting it, but a round of wider feedback is > welcome before opening the official RFC at > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Wikitech_contributors > > In summary: > > * wikitech.wikimedia.org (http://wikitech.wikimedia.org) would become the one > and only site for our open > source software contributors, powered by semantic software and an > ontology of categories shared across wiki pages, Bugzilla and hopefully > Gerrit. That seems wrong. Of the two, MediaWiki.org is clearly the more successful wiki. It is larger by all measures, and draws a wide pool of active contributors. This is reflected in the quality of the documentation, which (pace self-deprecating humor) tends to be quite good. Up until recently a good portion of the links on Wikitech's main page pointed to content that was flagged as obsolete. It has come some way since then, but not quite enough to subsume mediawikiwiki. The core of MediaWiki is in my mind still radical and exciting: you make or find a page, click edit, and just type into it. This seems to have gotten buried over the years under a pile of bad ideas and bad implementations, and skewered from the outside by MegaTronEditKillerLaserBot2000 and the like. The solution is not to pile additional layers on top, but to excavate MediaWiki from underneath them and make it fast as hell and simple, so that it once again feels like a dangerous, underspecified, liberating idea. Semantic this-and-that and ontologies of categories entails putting up rails everywhere and signs with arrows on them indicating which way you should go. That approach will inevitably end up reflecting a narrow, inflexible view of what a wiki is and what you do with it. And all the while MediaWiki will creak and groan from underneath. -- Ori Livneh _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
