On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 1:12 PM, Brion Vibber <bvib...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The last couple years we've done a big MediaWiki Dev Summit in January, > around the time of the Wikimedia Foundation all-hands meeting. Invitations > have been fairly broad to known developers, but there's a very strong > feeling that newbies, non-technical people, and in general *the people > MediaWiki is created and maintained for* are not welcome. > > I think we should change this. > > I would really like a broader MediaWiki Dev Summit that asks our users to > participate, and asks "developers" to interact with them to prioritize and > work on things that really matter to them. > > I want template authors, Lua module authors, template users, power editors, > folks working on the lines of defense for vandalism patrol and copyvio > checking. I want people with opinions on discussion systems. I want people > who have been editing for years and have experience with what works and > what doesn't. I want people who wish they could edit but have a bad > experience when they try, and want to share that with us so we can help > make it better. > Hear, hear. To make the discussion concrete, here are some issues I've had at past dev summits, which may also answer the question "what would these non-devs do?": * In a big session on services-oriented architectures, a lot of time was spent theorizing about what small wikis who do their hosting on shared-hosting services do, and whether various solutions we were proposing would make it easier or harder for these non-WMF users of mediawiki. *But none of these users were at the summit.* So no decisions could ultimately be made, as the necessary affected parties were not present. * I've tried to have conversations about the role of LanguageConverter and Content Translation at each dev summit. However, no one was present at the dev summit who used LanguageConverter on their home wiki, and few folks who rely on Content Translation routinely. (Maybe one or two were present, but not enough to have a reasonable discussion about the future of these features.) For better or worse, previous dev summits have had weak representation from those who are not American users of projects-other-than-enwiki. (Again, not that it as 100% American enwiki users, just that not enough others were present to constitute a reasonable quorum for discussing issues affecting them.) * The parsing team has various proposals for improvements to the template system. We don't really have a quorum of the "power users" of the wiki projects who write and use nontrivial templates. * In general the dev summit is pretty quite about projects other than wikipedia! Wikisource/wikibooks/wikitionary/commons/etc have lots of interesting technical work to be done, which is poorly represented by WMF employees. --scott ps. I am sympathetic to the idea that this sort of broader conversation about technical topics might fit better at wikimania. But the last few wikimanias have been moving in the opposite direction, to being less WMF-driven, and I actually thought Esino Lario was a quite nice example of how that can work. No one I talked to at Esino Lario felt that "not enough WMF staff were present" or that they couldn't get WMF answers to their questions when they needed. But this trend is opening a gap between WMF engineering and our user community, which we should try to bridge somehow or other. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
