Sorry to spam this talk page, but one other thing that I think it would be great to have on the front page of mediawiki.org is a row of logos of companies and organizations using MediaWiki. Quality usually beats quantity when showing logos, so here's a short list of companies and organizations that are well known, that I know for a fact are currently making substantial use of MediaWiki, and that I think would give permission for their logo to be used: Boeing, GE, NASA, NATO, SAP, Toshiba. (You could of course add Wikipedia and/or Wikimedia to that list.) As might be expected, there are many more companies and orgs than that, but those might be the top ones in terms of company size and name recognition.
Topic on Talk:MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018/Proposal
@Yaron Koren: Thanks for the comment! Companies and organizations using MediaWiki are currently covered in the second sentence, both by links to a list of websites and to testimonials by companies.
The description above does not include a problem statement (which problem would be solved by showing a row of logos) so it's hard to discuss the problem to potentially solve.
A row with logos would take a bit of additional space on the front page, outside of the per-audience boxes, to target a single audience (those who consider installing MediaWiki). The way bigger issue is that having a row of logos would require a process in place how to add my logo (plus "Why is my logo not there but the logo of that other website/company?") and criteria which logos to add or not add (company size? interpretations of the term "well known"?).
I'm not aware of such a process being in place and setting up such processes is out of scope for updating the content of the mediawiki.org front page. I'd propose to discuss whether and where and how to add logos and related criteria for Sites_using_MediaWiki and/or MediaWiki testimonials on the corresponding talk pages.
Another aspect is non-free content and fair use. Uploading such logos might not be allowed on mediawiki.org or Wikimedia Commons as it's not under a free license, see Special:Upload.
Hi,
Sure, I can include a problem statement, if that's helpful. One basic problem I see is that, even for the tiny fraction of people who have heard of MediaWiki, or the even smaller fraction who are aware of its uses outside of Wikimedia sites, the perception is that it's kind of a hobbyist tool: useful as a cheap way to put up lots of content, but if you're an organization with serious data needs you'll want to use some "serious" knowledge management software instead, like Microsoft SharePoint, to take one of many examples. A row of logos on the front page neatly refutes that misconception, by showing that even the largest and most successful companies and organizations, which presumably could use any software they want, benefit from using MediaWiki.
This is not information you could really gather from the current "list of websites" and "testimonials" pages, by the way - as far as I can tell, these massive organizations and their wikis are nowhere to be found on any of those pages, except for an entry for NASA in the "testimonials" page. (The "testimonials" page also has an entry for Intel, which is of course also a massive company - I didn't include it in my suggested list of logos because I haven't heard anything about Intel's use of MediaWiki in a long time, so I don't know if they're still using it.) For the most part, "list of websites" and "testimonials" are just a mass of small- and mid-level uses of MediaWiki, which, although useful to see, may actually reinforce the "hobbyist" perception, if anything.
Is it not enough to target only potential users? I don't know, but in this case I don't think that question applies because knowing that MediaWiki gets serious use as enterprise software is something that everyone would benefit from knowing - potential users, current admins, and developers.
It doesn't seem like a major problem to me that, sometime in the future, some company or organization will be upset that their logo isn't included - somehow thousands of software applications, proprietary and open source, manage to have a row of logos on their front page despite that potential issue. But if you want a heuristic, how about companies/organizations with more than 15,000 employees? That seems to pretty much cover the current list.
Might make sense (though not convinced if on the front page) but someone will have to sort out a process and the legal issues first. See my previous comment.
For the legal issue of using copyrighted logos - is there some technical way to display images that have not been uploaded to the wiki, like via a tiny custom extension or some such? Also, what makes this discussion "out of scope"? This is a discussion about what should go on the front page, and many or even most software applications have such a row of logos on their website's front page.
Sorry that I did not explain "out of scope" more clearly. What I meant is that I do not plan to block deploying an improved mediawiki.org frontpage for months to come on having some process in place that, if I understand correctly, requires putting non-free content on mediawiki.org and requires someone to decide which logos to show and which not. You are free to discuss this separately with anyone interested in maintainingMediaWiki_testimonials and Sites_using_MediaWiki.
Unlikely. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Upload which says "no fair use".
(See my edited comment above - I modified it after seeing you had modified your comment.)
Importing content (images) from a random third-party would be a violation of the privacy privacy.
No, they wouldn't be imported directly from their website, they would be uploaded to, say, the mediawiki.org server, then displayed from there.
You seem to propose working around the "no fair use" policy by having some non-wiki section for random file uploads on the mediawiki.org server. You would have to start a broader discussion about this. It sounds similar to so I think you would need to create a policy for what can end up there and why. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.)
No, I'm not talking about random file uploads, I'm talking about taking a set of logo images (with permission), putting them all in one place (on the mediawiki.org server or anywhere else) or maybe even assembling them all into one image, and then having a tiny extension to display that image(s) on a wiki page, using their hardcoded URL(s).
See my previous comments what this would require.
I don't see how adding a row of logos would add months to the process - the technical issues of adding copyrighted images to a wiki page aside, I'm guessing that the idea of adding logos with a simple heuristic for inclusion (e.g., over 15,000 employees + permission) wouldn't take more work to get consensus for than any other part of the front page. This is a standard part of software websites that I don't think anyone would be surprised to see here.
Oh, I missed your link before to that licensing policy page. That does present a challenge... perhaps I'll try to start a discussion about creating an exemption policy for this, since I think it's worth doing.