Topic on Talk:Third-party MediaWiki users discussion

Non-vendors in the list

11
Summary by Katkov Yury

All now is in place (honestly I just check how the Summarize feature of Liquid Threads works ;-) )

Yaron Koren (talkcontribs)

Hi - why are wikis like those of Intel, Novell etc. listed on this page? Those companies aren't MediaWiki vendors in any sense.

Katkov Yury (talkcontribs)

Indeed, it seems more like a mixed list of the companies that use MediaWiki as their own wiki with the companies, that actually provides some services and solutions based on MW platform. I think we should differ those two.

Katkov Yury (talkcontribs)

How about this structure for the list:

  1. public and private MediaWikis
  2. Wiki farms
  3. hostings with one-click MediaWiki installations
  4. people and companies that provide MediaWiki support and help
  5. people and companies that develop MW-based solutions and program extensions/skins
  6. (?) researchers with their research topics based on MediaWiki (I know a lot of scientists who make research for SMW)
G.Hagedorn (talkcontribs)

I feel rather unhappy to be listed as a "vendor" here. A vendor is someone who sells a product. The list contains various maintainers of small or larger mediawiki installations - only a fraction are "vendors". I propose to rename the page to MediaWiki_installations.

DanielRenfro (talkcontribs)

I second this ā€” "MediaWiki_installations" is more appropriate for the current information.

Nemo bis (talkcontribs)

That would make it a duplicate of Sites using MediaWiki. A description of what this lists wants to be is probably along the lines of "MediaWiki sysadmins with a diverse experience"; English is lucky, "clients" are not necessarily paying customers, is "vendors" really so negatively connotated? As a non-native speaker I have little clue...

Yaron Koren (talkcontribs)

Whether or not "vendors" is negative, it's not accurate. It seems like the best solution is just to get rid of the listings of regular sites, given that there's already a page for them...

Katkov Yury (talkcontribs)

I took the liberty to split the table to several pieces without changing the structure and without deletion.

Mitevam (talkcontribs)

Sorry everyone for the confusion. This "vendor" list was rather meant to help me find users to contact. I made it public so people can help me by adding to it and so that it "outlives" my internship project in case anyone needs it.

"Vendor" was definitely not the right term to hold all of the different users in the list and I should have anticipated the reaction. I apologize that it made some people uncomfortable. I hope "MediaWiki third-party user" is better.

I have moved the page to give it a new name, and restructured it, so that the list does not occupy a central place as it did. The focus should be on conversation and discussion. I hope its role is more clear now.

Thank you User:Katkov_Yury for restructuring the list and thank you everybody for the immediate feedback and for helping me improve my project. Please feel free to comment on the current setup and I will fix it if anything still seems odd.

Qgil-WMF (talkcontribs)

Don't feel bad! In just few days you got a very interesting list. I think your initial push can be helpful for actual MediaWiki consultants or "vendors" in some way to get better coordinated and advertise their services. The whole MediaWiki community benefits from this.

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

G.Hagedorn (talkcontribs)

I agree. I don't think "Vendor" is negative, I am happy to see our site alongsite with Vendor sites (but not listed as a vendor). Having a neutral heading and a structured list is very good.

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