The Signpost

Technology report

MediaWiki groups and why you might want to start snuggling newbie editors

MediaWiki groups get underway

The Indian city of Ahmedabad is on course to host one of the first local MediaWiki groups.

MediaWiki users (including Wikimedians) can now organise themselves into groups, receiving recognition and support-in-kind from the Wikimedia Foundation. The project, backed by new Wikimedia technical contributor coordinator Quim Gil, has seen five proposals lodged in its first week of operation.

Of those five, one (a local group centring on the Indian city of Ahmedabad) was proposed by a non-staff member and has easily surpassed the three signatures that will bring it into being. Of the other four, a second local group—this one based in San Francisco—has also met the participation threshold. The three proposed "thematic" groups (features testing, browser testing and marketing), proposed by staff, are struggling a little more, though all three will probably surpass the three signature barrier.

The idea of MediaWiki groups mimics that of Wikimedia User Groups, of which there are six. Gil wrote: "This is not about devs alone, but about people interested in all MediaWiki aspects, like testing fresh software, translating strings, participating in the UX design of a feature, helping triaging forgotten bug reports or enhancement requests".

What is: Snuggle?

In the first of a series exploring some of the newer and less well-known tools (editing aids) available to Wikimedia, the Signpost this week caught up with Aaron Halfaker (User:EpochFail), research analyst at the Foundation, about the tool he's been working on in his spare time, Snuggle.

Aaron reports that the system is currently in its early development phase. "I need your help to prioritize new features and to make sure the system is actually usable." He points potential testers to the current version, an IRC demo and feedback session (#wikimedia-office, 4 January at 1700 UTC/11AM CST), his talk page, and a newsletter. Interested developers can also submit bugs, features and pull requests to the public repository.

References

  1. ^ Wikimedia Foundation, The Editor Trends Study. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study
  2. ^ Bongwon Suh, Gregorio Convertino, Ed H. Chi, and Peter Pirolli. 2009. [The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia]. WikiSym '09. ACM, doi:10.1145/1641309.1641322
  3. ^ Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J., & Riedl, J. (in-press). The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia's reaction to sudden popularity is causing its decline. American Behavioral Scientist.
  4. ^ Halfaker, A., Kids these days: The quality of new Wikipedia editors over time, Wikimedia Blog. March 27, 2012.
  5. ^ David R. Musicant, Yuqing Ren, James A. Johnson, and John Riedl. 2011. Mentoring in Wikipedia: a clash of cultures. WikiSym '11 173-182. doi:10.1145/2038558.2038586. Note that Musicant et al., 2011 was written before Teahouse

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.


















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