MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group/Blog/2015-10-09

Meeting summary: Survey write up and Collaboration on core contributions

Author: Mark Hershberger

People: Mark Hershberger, Cindy Cicalese, Richard Heigl, Za Bien,

Tags: User Survey, core, Conference,

We just had our October meeting for #mwstake and, although we only have two action items, I'm pleased with how much we'll be able to accomplish if we can follow through on all of this.

Contributing to core

In a a few weeks, I'll be giving a presentation at SMWCon on Contributing back to core. There are lots of reasons I think that people who work with MediaWiki should do that (and a lot of reasons that it doesn't happen even when people want to), but I was looking for a good project to focus on for the presentation.

Cindy mentioned that she had been just made a new release on mw:Extension:Semantic_Title that took advantage of the MediaWiki's page_props table. As she pointed out, there isn't a lot of documentation for this in MediaWiki and support for accessing them is limited.

When she had made the release, she thought that it would be good to put some of the work she did into core and told us of her idea in the meeting. When I heard this I thought "Great! This would make a great example for my talk."

It looks like an opportunity to work with her, help others contribute back to MediaWiki core, and get a good focal point for my talk all in one fell swoop!

(Cindy also mentioned that she had another idea for related work that would change the behavior of MediaWiki. So, maybe my talk will have another example of how to change core behavior.)

Survey summary

We finished the MediaWiki User Survey after Wikimania but haven't yet haven't yet written up a good, readable summary. We do have a prioritized wishlist that combines the information we've collected from the survey with past discussions. You can view the wishlist on Mediawiki.org.

Serendipitously, a new person, Za Bien, showed up to our meeting and asked "How can I get involved?"

Richard Heigl had been struggling with the summary he promised to Chris Koerner so he jumped on the chance to get her help with the summary. Since they're both native German speakers, maybe they can produce the report in German and then write an initial translation to English for native speakers (like myself) to review.

One year anniversary

Next month marks the one year anniversary of #mwstake. I'm pleased with how much we've gotten done, but, after the discussion today, I hope we can begin to accomplish a lot more.