Chris, That is indeed the main problem I forsee with it, as with any new community-oriented site. Building up a community organically is hard and time-consuming. This is why I'm promoting it in a respectful manner here and elsewhere. Around 10 years ago, there was a successful forum with a very similar name which I helped moderate and assisted with quite a bit, but it fell by the wayside and I was unable to get through to the former owner in order to revive it. Given how far in the past it was, I felt that it's about time someone tried to fill that niche again.
Thank you for your suggestions on what can be done in order to help increase the likelihood it is used. If you or anyone else has further suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Let me know what I can do in order to draw you to start using it, even for non-Q&A purposes. Feel free to reply in private to avoid cluttering the list. Regards, Skizzerz -----Original Message----- From: MediaWiki-l [mailto:mediawiki-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of chris tharp Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2017 6:18 PM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing new MediaWiki forum Hi Ryan, Sounds like a great idea, but as it is won't it have a critical mass problem? Meaning the other methods used right now, like this mailing list, are attached one way, or another, to mediawiki.org and therefore draw people in. Without a lot of conversations, and questions answered, it won't show up on Google, and therefore newbies, and others, won't go. But only by getting a lot of people to go will questions be answered. My suggestions to get around the problem described above are: 1. Select a manageable list of common problems and post the answers to the new forum, 2. See if mediawiki.org would add a link to your forum on every extension page (or at the top of every talk page) like they do currently with Wikiapiary (under the check usage link). Anyways I wish you good luck with the forum. I hope it succeeds, but fear it will not get off the ground since it falls outside the needs of the software as advanced by the primary driver of the software (Wikipedia). Maybe I'm too skeptical, but having watched the evolution of mediaiwki for years now I've noticed a decidedly non-enterprise bent to the development of the software (for example, the 2015 Mediawiki Stakes Holder's survey, as I recall, found an overwhelming number of enterprise users wanted: 1. easily installation, upgrade and extension management (fundamentally years later no change, except for the use of composer for extension management, but at the cost of excluding all small wiki creators who don't have command line access, or lack the knowledge), 2. Visual editor (same as one -- and nothing about installing the visual editor is quick and easy), 3. More skinning and UI options (this one area that has seen an improvement with Foundation and Bootstrap options available) and 4, access control and management (this is one area of backwards development: the most popular access control extension, Lockdown, doesn't work with any Mediawiki pass 1.26). Additionally the very helpful, Extension Matrix, stopped working in 2013, which means there has no easy method to find new extensions for four years. So I hope I'm wrong to be skeptical and I hope your forum thrives. Sincerely, Chris > On Nov 8, 2017, at 2:56 PM, Sam Wilson <s...@samwilson.id.au> wrote: > > Isn't this rather a replication of the trial Discourse forum at > https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ ? (Which, unfortunately, is offline for > an upgrade at the moment!) > > But anyway, sounds like an interesting idea. :-) > > What software is it using? > > >> On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, at 06:10 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote: >> All, >> >> >> >> Right now, all methods of getting support for and general discussion >> about MediaWiki fall flat in many areas. >> >> * This mailing list is good for long-form questions and answers, >> but is difficult to search leading to multiple duplicate questions. >> The nature of the list also makes things like embedding screenshots >> difficult. >> * [[Project:Support desk]] on mediawiki.org is serviceable, but >> long-form questions or answers require a large amount of scrolling >> due to the narrow content width in Flow, and again attaching >> screenshots to illustrate problems is difficult. >> * The #mediawiki channel on IRC (and related channels) are not easy >> for newbies to discover or use, and many organizations block IRC >> meaning that we cut off this support method from those at such >> organizations who have MediaWiki questions. Like the other support >> methods, screenshots are also difficult. >> >> >> >> As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It >> aims to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support >> compared to the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as >> a hub where people who run their own MediaWiki installations can >> connect, share tips, and network. To my knowledge, there is no such >> “MediaWiki Users Group” >> outside of mailing lists at this time. The service is ad-free and >> content posted is available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so that particularly >> good answers can be used to bolster documentation on mediawiki.org. >> >> >> >> I encourage anyone that is interested to check it out, and please let >> me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about it 😊. >> >> >> >> Regards, >> >> Skizzerz >> >> >> >> [1] https://mwusers.org >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> MediaWiki-l mailing list >> To unsubscribe, go to: >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l > > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-l mailing list > To unsubscribe, go to: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
