8 July 2016 MWstake Meeting

Date (UTC):	8 July 2016 15:00:00 - 8 July 2016 16:00:00
URL:	https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/E211
Etherpad:	https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/mwstake-2016-07
Attendees:	Chris Koerner, Cindy Cicalese, Lex Sulzer, Mark Hershberger, Markus Glaser, Robert Radke, Sabine Melnicki, Toni Hermoso Pulido, Wolfgang Fahl

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Update from WikiMania

• Markus has a good impression of people's feelings about #mwstake
• Core dev meeting asked questions of Markus as a position of authority about 3rd party usage
• The visibility of the stakeholder group is getting better
• Markus got a lot of good feedback
• Meeting of about 10 people during Wikimania - a core developer confirmed that there is a need for development
• tgr confirmed the need for a group like #mwstake
• In summary, Wikimania was very efficient
• Host something at the next Hackathon related to the wishlist
• Robert: surprise at how few engineers at the WMF are dedicated to core MW development

SMWCon

• Sabine: What should we do for SMWCon?
• Markus: How do we get SMW devs and MediaWiki devs (volunteer and WMF) to work together – also involvement of SMW devs in MW organization (not MW devs in SMW)

Development

• Cindy: Antipathy (& frustration) toward MW core development from community folks (SMW and other) due to changes in core with no clear direction (or head's up)
• There's also some frustration within the Foundation round talking about core code

CTO search

• We should keep an eye on this. Can we voice an opinion?
• Chris will reach out to WMF folks to see where we can provide input
• For Cindy :) https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/161834?t=30xl7i

Survey

• Different approach (qualitative interviews not survey, interview AND survey?)
• Should we use the questions @Lex added here: T138512: Create a survey about MediaWiki usage
  • they are very practically orientated +1 Sabine
• Goal: Get user stories, look into their hearts, value MW usage
• Compile a list for interview partners, eg. Wiki of the Months (Wikiapiary might be useful too)
• Agree on a frame, e.g. interview length, mode of notetaking or recording – the shorter the better (it gets longer by itself)
• Work on questions
• Wikistats beta: https://wikistats.wmflabs.org
  • Third-party Mediawiki's are #2 by number of wikis, #1 by user count, and #1 in total pages - beating out all of the Wikipedias combined. // Note that these stats (pretty badly maintained in that respect) are full of dupes for third party wikis, still Wikipedias are outnumbered substantially!

Status of incorporation

• Mark and Bernadette have been working on setting up a Non-profit
• About incorporating: Stripe Atlas is a new product designed to give entrepreneurs access to the basic building blocks for starting a global Internet business.

Status of MoU (Memorandum of Understanding)

• Address feedback we've gotten from @Qgil
• Next steps

Phabricator

• Cindy will create subprojects of the Phabricator MediaWiki-Stakeholders project for each working group listed on mwstake.org plus a general subproject
• as for now, technical conversation can be done in the regular chat room Z245: #mwstake

Upcoming Events

• SMWCon - Frankfurt - 28 - 30 September
• Dev Summit - Monterey, CA and SF - Week of January 9th 2017
• Wikimedia Hackathon 2017 - Vienna, Austria - May 19-21 2017

Survey questions

1. Why did you choose MediaWiki over a simple file-system/Microsoft-Office approach? –market
2. Why did you choose MediaWiki over a competing system like Confluence, SharePoint, FileMaker or some other wiki system? –market
3. What reactions (and problems, if any), did you encounter until your relevant superior decision takers approved investing in MediaWiki? -market
4. What reactions (and problems, if any), did you encounter until your relevant subordinates/colleagues had turned into intrinsically motivated and aptly skilled MediaWiki users?
5. Imagine your organization's wikis as trains. Trains need to be kept clean and maintained in order to be effective and efficient. So do your wikis. Who assumes these tasks in/for your organization? (e.g. usage instructions, backup, update, template design, configuration, cleaning and consolidating data, etc.) –technical (I'd say it's organizational)
6. Is your organization obliged to record a complete chain of evidence about data provenance and revision ("subject to compliance")?
7. Imagine a new employee joins your organization and the only source of explanatory information she has available are your wikis (instead of a mentor, a boss or colleagues). To what extent would the wikis be capable to familiarize her with the aspects relevant to her job description and/or mission statement? –use cases

4 questions distilled from above

1. Software decision/Market – 0.1-0.3 – What influenced your decision in choosing MW?
2. Culture – 0.4 – What problems arose in implementing MW in your organization?
3. Organization/Technical –0.5-0.6 –
4. Use cases – 0.7 – Is the wiki capable of showing all necessary information for a new employee about your organization?

Surrounding question

• What parts of your wiki would you like to present in a use case to the public?

Questions from SMW's Wiki of the Month

There are 10 questions on thewiki of the month page on SMW.

• What is the wiki about? (topic)
• What is the history of the wiki - when was it created, and by whom?
• What are typical pages on the wiki?
• Who is using it? (community)
• What are the key statistics figures? (infobox statistics as on AIFB Web Portal)
• Why is SMW used? (say what it accomplishes, give examples)
• What information is stored in SMW?
• Which other interesting MediaWiki extensions are used, and why?
• What was your experience with using SMW? (what was easy, what was challenging?)
• What else is special about your use of SMW? (innovations, workarounds, tips, best practices)

Comment by Wolfgang

Content is king - I'd focus some questions on the content that was the motivation to use SMW as a platform.

There is also a visibility issue - quite a few great SMW wikis are intranet wikis and not public so there do not get much visibility

don't understand, how is this a problem? –Sabine

WF: if we want to show how useful SMW is we need to be able to show the content and make it easily accessible. That's much easier for regular Mediawiki sites than for the SMW based intranet sites.

True. Will models, screenshots, screencasts, presentations do?

that's exactly the issue if you want to show how nicely things work

Hm. Maybe that's a good question to ask the interviewees, too. )