Restructure MediaWiki.org (or: Document how it was and execute it)
Fragment of a discussion from Project:Current issues
Given the subject, it's ironic that your policy proposal has been placed in the user namespace, rather than the project namespace! :-)
I agree that there are big problems at the moment. Thanks for categorising the current state-of-affairs. It's a good starting point for discussion. I want to check that you've seen Project:Namespaces, which gives an overview of how things were originally set up. I think that the current namespace structure pretty much holds, and the problem is that we are seeing drift caused by a couple of factors:
- There is a lot more drafting and discussion about work-in-progress happening here.
- Stuff relating to WMF deployment/servers/meetings/etc. and features that are predominantly for WMF purposes used to be documented at Meta, but are now being documented here.
- New stuff is added to and changed in the software all the time (hooks/settings/features/etc.), but the documentation on this site is not often updated (or if it is, it is not done thoroughly or well).
- When I first structured the site, a number of years ago now, the focus was nearly exclusively on documenting the existing software, so it was pretty clear where things should go. However, it is not so easy to compartmentalise things now - it is harder to know whether something is considered 'developer discussion' or 'documentation' - so people don't know where to put things. The majority of new material now seems to be planning for future software. Planning (under the current structure, at least) is something that belongs in the main namespace, but is all-too-often placed in the User or Manual namespace. However, once the feature is implemented there are parts that should be moved into the Manual (documentation) namespace, and parts that should stay where they were. It is not always clear when or how these should be moved, and in general it doesn't happen.
- There are very few people who are actively maintaining the site, and those that do either don't have the knowledge, or feel that they don't have the authority to move or refactor things, particularly when content is coming from sources that are pretty god-like in the developer community (but who may know nothing about how MW should be structured, and care even less). So even if it is clearer where things should go, the bit-rot is still likely to set in unless there are more hands to the pumps. A clearer policy would help with this.
Just my initial thoughts - thanks for opening up the discussion.
