Link within [[Template:Extension|Extension]] to allow developers to solicit donations
I definitely support having subpages of extensions where community members can offer advice and their own support and experience with installing extensions. One extension that I would really like support with installing is Extension:Farmer. The directions are very poor and rely heavily on a detailed knowledge. I plan to setup a private wiki farm to use as a way of creating new wikis quickly and with all the extensions and configurations setup.
Subpages with sysadmin and devoloper advice from folks not directly involved with the extension is an interesting idea. Is there a feeling this would be unique enough from the talk page uses?
You know, after giving this more thought, I've changed my mind just a little bit. User page documentation is not a bad thing, and would not risk cluttering the extension docs if we decided to make subpages a free-for-all. The question boils down to: who decides what will be documented, and what won't?
For example, plenty of how-to documents are technically wrong, and may be objectionable to a technically-minded extension developer, but they would still be helpful as very speedy introductions to productively using something.
As we're already aware, sometimes it's not going to work to always let the extension developers assert "ownership" of their extension's docs. We have the Cite extension on mediawiki.org, right? Perhaps we can formulate a policy that says deletion of at lesat vaguely relevant further information on user pages, linked-to using wiki links or cites (whichever the developer prefers), is not normally acceptable, even if it isn't 100% pedantically accurate, or even mostly wrong.
Nobody starts out getting everything right - we need to give people a chance to start, without scolding them for making mistakes, and without sidelining them to obscurity. That allows anyone to unobtrusively add their notes and links to their user page documentation, without implying that it is "official" or representative of the extension developer's advice.
Does that sound workable? The extension developer (or anyone else) would be free to edit the note to say why they disagree with it, but the information would still be there in case anyone found it useful. From there, the usual editing policies dealing with good faith, vandalism, etc would apply to filter out abuses of a liberal documentation policy like that, but I don't foresee much potential for problems, so I suppose we don't really need to spend much effort thinking it over. The only people even interested in this are people with good intentions, and something valuable to add.
What do you think?
