Wikimedia blog maintenance/April 2011 overhaul

This page attempts to assess the current situation regarding Wikimedia blogs, and to propose improvements.

Current situation
The Wikimedia blog was created in April 2008; it was presented then as a way to "engage in a less formal discussion, and to bring up the sorts of topics that may not fit in a press release" and "a space to ask questions of the Wikimedia community.

The Wikimedia tech blog was created in March 2009. Its goal stated then was to be "much more technical [...] than the Wikimedia Blog (which covers Foundation issues and news)" and to cover "software updates, server changes, and other such issues".

In practice, though, the line between the content of these two blogs is difficult to draw. Monthly engineering reports, for example, aren't only of interest for a tech audience. Having two blogs also creates redundancy.

Besides, as the Wikimedia Foundation grows, other departments are likely to want dedicated blog sections as well; it's already the case for the Community and the Strategic product departments. Initiatives like India and the Brazil Catalyst Project are likely to follow.

Our current blog setup suffers from some flaws:
 * The current layout gives all posts the same weight, whether they're important announcements or "routine" posts.
 * The current layout makes it difficult to browse posts by topic; categories are underused or abused, and in any case hidden in the sidebar.
 * The theme imitates the Vector skin of MediaWiki, but isn't really adapted to showcase the content of a thematically diverse blog.
 * The coverage is inconsistent, depending on the size & composition of the teams, and willingness to communicate.

Having some sort of separation between departments would help solve some of these issues. However, creating different blogs for each department causes additional issues:
 * Readers need to subscribe to several RSS feeds, or to visit different websites.
 * Posts get duplicated between blogs.
 * Blogs require separate administration and maintenance; accounts have to be created separately.

Fortunately, it's possible to accomplish some separation with a unique blog used well.

The best of both worlds
It is proposed to merge the technical blog and the main Wikimedia blog, and to use a magazine theme with department-specific categories.
 * "Routine" posts can be published in the department's category, and "important" announcements into an additional "featured posts" category that would give them more prominence/visibility. For example, tech-related posts that are directed to a wide audience could be placed in such a category, to separate them from the more "under-the-hood", specialized tech posts.
 * Information will be centralized in one place; at the same time, navigation by topic will be easier.
 * Readers can subscribe to category RSS feeds if they want to follow only one department/topic.
 * Blogrolls etc. can be managed on a per-category basis.
 * The appearance of Wikimedia blogs will remain consistent.

Steps

 * Get the Communications team to sign off on this proposal
 * Organize the existing blog content into department categories
 * Find an appropriate magazine theme
 * Post away!

Merging the tech blog:
 * Back up both blogs
 * Back up all URLs from the tech blog to create redirects
 * Import articles from the tech blog to the main blog (as private / not published)
 * Clean up as needed (including tags & categories)
 * Publish all the imported articles
 * Add redirects from old tech blog URLs to the new URLs on the main blog

Things to consider in the future

 * Small "status" widget, linking to http://status.wikimedia.org and/or short articles about outages; right now the information is scattered around microblogs / short articles on the tech blog (but should interest a very general audience of users)
 * Identica Widget
 * Currently, the Communications team oversees the main blog. In order to scale this, each department category could be overseen by a representative from said department, and the Communications team could focus on important announcements / featured posts.