Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Hacker

Suggestion / Advise Request

@Doc James:, this is the idea I mentioned to you on the Wikimania 2019. Advice is greatly appreciated xinbenlv ^{Talk, Ping} 17:44, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

User:Xinbenlv excellent idea :-) Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:18, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

User:Xinbenlv, we have an entire wiki for this. Please start at mw:How to become a MediaWiki hacker. It has links to a lot of resources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:30, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Thank you! Just to clarify, we are proposing here to include not just software developers but also UX designers, product managers, data scientists and other roles of modern product builders. And not just MediaWiki software but also all kinds of tools and applications helping the Wikimedia Movement. Does mw:How to become a MediaWiki hacker contains these? If so, happy to merge, but not sure... Thank you! xinbenlv ^{Talk, Ping} 14:29, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

See mw:Design, mw:Product development, etc. Analytics lives at wikitech:Analytics and Research has a namespace at Meta (start at m:Research:Index). Everything that's meant to work across all wikis happens there (so, not usually local templates, but almost everything else would be welcome). I see that you have a phab: account; are you also on m:IRC or following any of the technical m:mailing lists?

You might consider turning this into a {{soft redirect}} to WP:VPT (which is where the tech folks gather on this wiki) or making it an index of resources ("If you have a question, go to WP:VPT; if you want to learn to code, try mw:How to become a MediaWiki hacker; if you already know how to code, go straight to the mw:Developer hub; if you want to do something other than coding, find the link at mw:How to contribute...). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:50, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

I want to be clear that if there's an existing group of people that want to use this page to coordinate their work, then I have no objections! But "build it, and they will come" is very unlikely to work out in this instance. You're competing against a collection of better resources (the entire mw: wiki) and an established venue (WP:VPT), which, despite the page title, has a regular cadre of contributors that already meets the definition of WP:WikiProject (a group of people who work together to improve Wikipedia). WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:35, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: thank you for your advice and participating in this discussion. Up until so far, I think there what you have suggested have not be overlapped of what we propose here.

• it's not mw:How to become a MediaWiki hacker because this group doesn't only develop to MediaWiki (actually, at this point mediawiki is more heavily developed by WMF than community)/
• it's not mw:Design because it's not designer from WMF nor designer only MediaWiki.
• it's not WP:VPT because on one hand WP:VPT to me is more of a problem discussion area where technical people and non technical people comes together to report and resolve technical issues. We are trying to run a sub-community to engage product builders. Also, we hope to not limited to EN developers so will probably move to meta soon
• it's not mw:Product development because that is a page describing product development but not a sub community.
• it's not mw:Developer hub because it's basically not limited to MediaWiki, in fact there is many things we can build that can be done other than using MediaWiki. For example, @Doc James: mention to me that some other tasks (I presume WikiProject Med) are needing help from developers.
• the goal is to create a sub-community that is tailor towards the experience of product builders. For example, if I want to find other product managers or analytics, where should I reach out to? If I want to pitch ideas and team up with other roles to build a product, where should I present my ideas? That's the goal of hackers. And the plan is not just to build a page and people will come, I think we will run events to outreach to people with such expertise and engage them to join the Wikimedia movement. xinbenlv ^{Talk, Ping} 22:53, 23 August 2019 (UTC)