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Hello

This is your letter from Hogwarts personal invitation to become a community representative in the Technical Decision Forum (TDF).

Your contributions to the movement so far make you an excellent candidate, so we hope you'll consider joining. Please visit the TDF Community Representation page for more information, and email TDFSupport@wikimedia.org by Aug 12, 2022 to be considered for selection. Do note that the requirements listed on wiki so far are just a starting point, they are not set in stone; just provide your name, name of the group you "represent" if any, and a short sentence or two explaining your interest.

For any questions, please post at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Technical_decision_making/Forum, or on the related Movement Strategy Forum topic, or simply email TDFSupport@wikimedia.org.

Thank you! --the Technical Decision Forum.

The coding phase of the meta:Toolhub project is starting up. We are working towards creating a "better" catalog of tools used to improve the wikis. The main coding work will be done by Srishti and myself, but we would like to have a small group of folks who we can ask for help in designing the software. One of the roles we are looking for in our advisory council is a tech volunteer with strong RTL webdev skills. We are wondering if you might be interested in filling that role?

• Expected time commitment is 30-60 minutes per week to participate in asynchronous discussions on Phabricator and the toolhub-dev mailing list with an occasional video call to resolve more controversial or complex issues
• Initial commitment to participate through December 2020
• The group will have a retrospective in December 2020 and decide on future plans

If you are interested, the group would be excited to have you join us. If you have too many commitments already or are just not excited about Toolhub, that is ok too. :)

Hi Brian, thanks for reaching out, that sounds interesting and I'm willing to help.

Thanks for reading over and improving the project page. I'm curious though, you've segmented out a bit of the content under the heading "English Wikipedia". I was under the impression that while the Ambox template (and Lua module) originated at English Wikipedia, that they are in use across many projects. I don't want to give folks the wrong impression that this information only pertains to English Wikipedia. How can we make this better? Do you think maybe we shouldn't link to the English Wikipedia pages, but maybe something more movement-wide (like the Wikidata entry)? Thanks for your time and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Hi Chris, I fixed various issues related to ambox support in hewiki, and while going over the documentation I found it is very oriented to English Wikipedia.

The main issues I find there - "Ambox" terminology isn't clear to someone who doesn't write in enwiki (AM is abbr), and the whole hierarchy of templates (messagebox=>ambox=>article for deletion) doesn't have to be the same in other wikis (the introduction and the screenshot is clear enough).

I think it would be ideal to document it from technical perspective - e.g not template Ambox but an element with CSS class ambox. Also I was about to open a phab ticket about it - if software assume there is a Lua module "Ambox", we should pack it nicely as part of Scribunto (or some other extension) to avoid each wiki copy&pasting module from enwiki. However after a 2nd thought I'm not sure about it (microformats of CSS class are also valid choice - but need to documented with the correct terminology).

Thanks

Hi there! Because you are a proud member of the community taskforce for the visual editor, I'm sending you this short questionnaire so that we can learn how to improve existing resources and about different ways to build and share community knowledge. Thanks for participating! I'll come back here to collect your answers on September 9th. I'll collate answers on the taskforce talk page. Talk to you soon!

PS: If for any reason you'd like to provide your answers privately, just send me an email instead.

1. Was the existing documentation about how to adapt the visual editor to your context useful to you?
   • Do you have ideas about how to improve or expand it? (Note it has been changed recently, here's what it looked like before.)
   • What is your preferred format to learn about something or about how to get things done? Feel free to list tools or other resources, even if they aren't being used currently on our sites.
2. What is the one thing related to adapting the visual editor which is not explained well anywhere and you're still struggling to learn more about?
3. Did you create additional documentation/resources to help yourself and others? Like user guides, how-to/instruction pages, etc.? If so, please provide links.
4. Did somebody else from WMF or your community assist you with the visual editor community work you did so far? Please list names and the ways they provided support (like, Alice sent me an email to explain how to do X). Please, add community members' names to the taskforce list if they are not there yet.

1. I didn't know of this documentation, so it wasn't useful for me, but it seems to be nice idea.
   1. I think it is too long and as such not very accessible. I believe the audience for this page are mostly non English speakers so it would be nice to make it sentence-less page with pointers to more details
   2. MediaWiki documentation pages for extensions
2. "adopt" = adopt wiki / customizations to make VE work in wiki or adopt=adopt user to VE? I will answer both:
   1. Users - There is a gap in the way newbie can adopt VE. For example as talk pages doesn't work with VE. Hence, newbies most learn both (simple) wikitext as well as VE for actual editing.
   2. Wikis - WMF cannot, and probably don't want to, take responsibility for developing any type of customization that specific wiki need. (and if it does, it usually end up badly as Extension:PageTriage which is by design works only for enwiki). Special, non built-in customization for VE, required for specific site can only be written as JS gadgets - I did try to improve this area (see 3), but I feel it is still partially missing. I hope this obstacle can be mitigated at least partially in T106996 and by additional examples of gadgets.
3. VisualEditor/Gadgets - which I think is one of the more important stuff that is still partially missing (because there are not so many existing examples).
4. VE team (and Mooeypoo) are very responsive and kindly assists me whenever I need any help

Welcome to MediaWiki.org!

Yes, welcome! This site is dedicated to documenting the MediaWiki software, the software behind many wikis, including that of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation projects.
Please, take a look at the following pages. They might prove useful to you as a newcomer here:

• Landing instructions
• Project:About
• How does MediaWiki work?
• Help:Editing pages
• Frequently asked questions
• How to contribute
• Policies

If you have any questions, please ask me on my talk page. Once again, welcome, and I hope you quickly feel comfortable here, and find this site useful documentation of the MediaWiki software.

Thanks, and regards,