Thread:Talk:Technical communications/Dev wiki consolidation/Where to draw the line/reply (11)

I'm all for making things related to MediaWiki and WMF sysadmin work saner, but I'm not sure whether this is the correct way to go about it. Instead of further spreading information between these two wikis &mdash; MediaWiki.org and Wikitech &mdash; we should be considering consolidating information into one place for easy accessibility. Not just for our sake, but for our users' sake.

Technical communications/Dev wiki consolidation tries to justify this split by comparing the situation to the mailing lists, but that's a rather bad comparison, given that the mailing lists have been around for (over) 10 years. Sometimes mistakes happen and they may not be easy to fix or people may not even think much of it. Personally, the way I see it, MediaWiki-l is for new users' general questions and whatnot &mdash; maybe someone really does prefer mailing lists over on-wiki support desks and whatnot &mdash; whereas wikitech-l is for current and future development, wild proposals and other crazy ideas.

Splitting MediaWiki.org into a user-oriented and a developer-oriented wiki possibly can't be good for anyone. We're not a commercial project, there's no reason to have the developer docs on a separate site. MediaWiki.org is a giant hub for all things MediaWiki and many of us like it just that way, as it gives us a nice overview of what's going on where, how I could help (GSoC, OPW, etc.) and so on.

WMF engineering pages, reports and plans here are somewhat of an oddball, but they're still relevant, because the WMF is the single biggest user and developer of MediaWiki and many profilic developers &mdash; former volunteers &mdash; are current Foundation employees and all.

On the other hand, what about things relevant only to a certain party, such as ShoutWiki, Wikia or wikiHow? If the information is useful, MediaWiki-related and possibly helpful for others struggling with similar issues, then MediaWiki.org should be the place for that kind of info.

tl,dr: One wiki to rule them all; let that wiki be MediaWiki.org and merge everything else into it instead of moving pages from it.