Topic on Talk:Events

Yaron Koren said:

Gil - you renamed the page "MediaWiki developer meetings" on mediawiki.org to "Events", which seemed fine to me at the time, but now I think it was a mistake. The page is now getting filled up with events that may potentially be interesting to MediaWiki developers - like LibrePlanet - but that aren't MediaWiki-focused in any way.

I created that page so that there would be a record of MediaWiki-based events, past and future, because I thought it would be useful to see at a glance what all the events have been, and what additional ones there will be. But with a generic name like "Events", the page gets opened up to potentially dozens of additional events a year - anything related to open source, Linux, PHP, enterprise software, and so on; and thus, the original intent of the page gets a lost. There's a note at the top of the page explaining that the page is only for MediaWiki-based events, but many people (including you - no offense :) ) are ignoring it. So I think it makes sense to change it back to the old name, and maybe create a new page, called "Additional events" or something, that holds everything else - including borderline events like Wikimania.

Any thoughts?

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

I believe that it's worth listing events when there is a MediaWiki session approved or even where there are MediaWiki community contributors attending. By having them listed here we might be encouraging others to go and meet. In those cases a subpage for details and coordination should be created. Events/LibrePlanet2013 is in fact a good example of this approach.

See this change that I reverted for a potential solution to list events that are relevant but don't have any MediaWiki specific content (yet?). It is our interest to inject the MediaWiki agenda to more events and we are touching more and more subjects going beyond the traditional PHP / CMS world: mobile, HTML5, big data... In each of these fields there are events that in fact would be delighted of receiving MediaWiki related content (especially as in "the backstage of Wikipedia").

I reverted the change because so far the events listed do have a link with MediaWiki. (And I listed Wikimedia Summit India when it seemed clear that there would be MediaWiki sessions there. I might have been too fast typing, indeed.)  :)

Does this make sense to you?

PS: I also believe that shortening the first paragraph would increase the chances that people actually read it. I did, though.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

It makes sense - that's why I suggested having two pages: "MediaWiki developer meetings" and "Additional events". You could call the latter "Events" instead. The naming doesn't matter to me, as long as there's a distinction between the two types.

Actually, here's another suggestion: the "Events" page is kept, or modified, exactly how you want it, and meanwhile I recreate the "MediaWiki developer events" page, keeping only those events that are specific to MediaWiki developers. It seems like a win-win - what do you think?

Why splitting in two pages? It's not that we have hundreds of events every year... Scanning through the current list is not problematic. By splitting we would have two somewhat-weak pages instead of a decent one...

I still don't see what bothers you in the current approach. What events you feel like "not belonging" here.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

I listed an example of such an event before - LibrePlanet.

Basically, I think it's useful to have a list of just the events that have been held that are specific to MediaWiki. There used to be such a list for a few months, but now there isn't any longer. Is that such a strange request to make? It would seem like something that every software project would want to have.

Your argument is reasonable, but I hope you realize that my argument about creating a new page for just one event not fitting currently in the requirements makes sense as well.  :) I have introduced a little change trying to address your concern.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

It's not just one event - the current page already lists two other such events, FOSDEM and the Southern California Linux Expo, and there could well end up being many more, past and future. It could be useful to list all the events at which somebody gave a talk about MediaWiki - but that's a very different thing from listing all the MediaWiki-specific events. These are two different kinds of things, with two different audiences, but they're both potentially useful for people to see - so why not have two separate pages for them?

I have just done the separation between MediaWiki events and events with MediaWiki participation. The audience for both has clear overlaps (I would say it's basically the same). It's not worth creating a page for 3 events. Can we reopen this discussion if the list grows out of control?

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Okay, thanks, I think that's fine for now. I don't think the audience is the same - I bet there are many people who are interested in knowing about hackathons and the like, but couldn't care less whether someone from the WMF is speaking at the SoCal Linux Expo (no offense).