Jump to content

Submissions/How about a MediaWiki Consortium?

From Wikimania 2014 • London, United Kingdom

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2014.

Submission no. 8504
Title of the submission

How about a MediaWiki Consortium?

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

discussion

Author of the submission

User:Mglaser

E-mail address
Username

Mglaser and Mark A. Hershberger

Country of origin

Germany and United States

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

MediaWiki Release Team, WMDE

Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Spreading open knowledge is not just about content, but also about tools. That's the reason we provide MediaWiki as an open source product. Fortunately, MediaWiki is used widely outside the Wikimedia world, so our mission is fulfilled, right? Well, not quite. Third party users of MediaWiki do have very specific needs that are naturally of minor interest to running Wikimedia sites. These include the installer, support for different platforms and databases, integration with other software, extension dependencies, and packaging, just to name a few.

For quite some time now, the idea has been around to build a separate entity that cares about the third party use of MediaWiki (e.g. on mediawiki.org). With the formation of the release management team, a first step has been taken to separate releases from the deployment process. We think now it's time to tackle that task and work our way towards an institution of its own that cares for MediaWiki as a software product.

There are a lot of questions and decisions to be made:

  • Do we actually need a separate institution?
  • Who are the stakeholders?
  • How could such an organisation get its money?
  • What could be a possible form of organisation?
  • How can it coexist with the Wikimedia Foundation, how are architecture decisions made?
  • What are the main areas of interest of such an organisation?

In this session, we are asking for your input. We'd like to discuss some ideas with you and hope to define some next steps towards a MediaWiki Consortium (or whatever form it will take).

Track
  • Technology, Interface & Infrastructure
Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)
30 minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
yes
Slides or further information (optional)
Interactive webstream: https://plus.google.com/events/c2oanp0td876hrnbf87cma2jco8
Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wm2014-mwusergroup
Follow-Up: initial meeting of Wiki Co-op user group
Special requests


Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with a hash and four tildes. (# ~~~~).

  1. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 10:26, 6 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  2. RichardHeigl (talk) 09:38, 22 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  3. --Qgil (talk) 23:21, 7 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  4. -- Illuminatusds (talk) 13:13, 9 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Addshore (talk) 15:22, 9 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  6. --Micru (talk) 23:16, 9 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Add your username here.
Retrieved from "https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Submissions/How_about_a_MediaWiki_Consortium%3F&oldid=49554"