MediaWiki blog: Call for contributions

by Bryan Hilderbrand on 5 January 2020 19:28 (EST)

Tags:	Community, News
People:	Richard Heigl

Our joint project, mediawiki.blog, is going to be live in the near future. To truly be "our" project, we are asking you to contribute articles.

At the last SMWCon in Paris I suggested that we should push communication about MediaWiki with a new MediaWiki news channel as a joint project.

The concept is a community blog like opensource.com but focused on MediaWiki and more open and accessible to would-be contributors. Anyone will be able to create an account and post contributions. Contributions will be curated and reviewed by a small editorial team to make sure they meet some minimum standards before they are accepted and published to the front page.

In the new year, with funding and design for the blog provided by Hallo Welt! for the MWStakeholders, my idea is becoming a reality.

This will be a place where we can report on new developments, events, experiences and new services as well as announcements, RfCs, field reports, best practices and howtos, texts about MediaWiki and whatever else seems important to us.

The blog deliberately closes the gap between the Wikimedia Techblog, which focuses on issues concerning the Foundation, the mailing lists, various social media channels and the blogs that you already run yourself.

We want to create a easily accessible, casual, gathering place for the larger world to find information pertinent to the third party community. We will be able to refer to service providers and developers, point to you as authors and active contributors and show that MediaWiki is much more than a craft project.

Of course, we would like to have posted a few articles so that the blog already has some content when we make a larger, more public announcement and that is where you come in: we need contributions from users like you. Could you contribute a small article for the start?

Something will come from Hallo Welt! about a Push&Merge function and two-factor authorization.

To help you think of things to write about, here are some ideas of the sort of things we would like to see (but feel free to add your own ideas):

• Announcements about new or updated extensions
• things that happened at EMWCon or the Hackathon
• Yaron's podcast
• stuff about containers
• about Meza
• about Wikidata
• Translatewiki
• new semantic templates and Semantic MediaWiki
• new developments from Wikimedia
• SAML
• hosting
• skins
• etc.

Please think about what you are working on and if you want to write a few lines about it and send me a mail until 31 January 2020 with your ideas and texts to: hallowelt. We will put them into a temporary blog and start to sort them out and develop a content structure (e.g. categories). As soon as the final blog system is ready, the content will move there.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me. I know that a joint project always sounds good at first, but now it is time to actually do the work and make it happen.

And of course everyone who wants to join the editorial team is very, very welcome!

I look forward to your feedback.

Richard (for the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group)

PS: Spread the word! You are welcome to forward this mail to people who could and should write something.