User talk:Mitevam

Welcome to my talk page.

I am currently applying for the Outreach Program for Women Internship with Wikimedia.

To learn more about me, see my User page. Also, take a look at my application/project proposal. I would appreciate your comments in the "Outreach Program for Women endorsements" section below.

Release notes
Welcome, and first of all wow – first child! I have a question: will your vendors tour help understand what's important for third party MediaWiki users in our MediaWiki releases? We have the problem that many don't understand why they really should update MediaWiki, and as you can see on MediaWiki 1.20 our release announcements are plainly horrible. See previous discussions like. --Nemo 09:02, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your reply: yes, that's what I meant.
 * Thanks also for your mediawiki-i18n email, I have two qustions about it: 1) do you want others to edit the list? if yes, and/or if you want it to "survive you", it's better to move it to a subpage of your userpage, so that people feel more comfortable about editing it and if necessary it can be easily moved to another title; 2) is this only about medium to big companies or also individual consultants (single-person companies?)? Thanks, Nemo 11:38, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, Nemo! I would love people to add to the table. The idea is that the communication should continue after my internship so I don't want to keep "ownership" of anything. I am currently trying to figure out where would be best to move the table too and also how/where to set up the space for the discussion. Suggestions are welcome! 2) This is definitely not only about medium to big companies. There are some single consultants on the list. I have not included all single wikis I find since the number was overwhelming and it seemed more productive to focus on people who use MediaWiki as part of their business. However, single wikis with a lot of activity or interesting customization, for example, are welcome as well. Mitevam 16:44, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Ok, I'll add some then. Nemo 17:43, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

things to ask users of mw
On IRC, you asked me:
 * as I am planning to reach out to 3-rd party users, is there anything specific you would like to ask them about release notes and how to make them more useful?

I came across this comment in bugzilla today:


 * I'm *really* dreading my next MediaWiki upgrade now; I *hope* these changes will make upgrading my customer skin easier, but after this experience I'm going start setting aside entire weekends to MediaWiki upgrades, rather than the half an hour it's taken me for every upgrade since 1.12.

That is probably more helpful for the developers, but I think it shows an important pain point that may help inform your questions. -- ☠ MarkAHershberger ☢ (talk) ☣ 20:35, 10 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the info, Mark. I got a very similar comment from another user today in an email, so this is shaping to be an important topic of discussion. Mitevam 16:45, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Vendors table in own page
Hello Mariya! You table of MediaWiki vendors is looking good. It's better to have it in an own page, though. You can start having it under your User page e.g. User:Mitevam/MediaWiki vendors. Then it will be easier to move it to a final location keeping all the edit history.

Just in case: your work can benefit from Sites using MediaWiki and you might also want to update that page with your findings. There is also Sites using InstantCommons. I'm not sure if that last one is helpful but I thought you might find it interesting anyway. :)--Qgil (talk) 16:30, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Qgil, I am actually just trying to figure out where would be best to move the table to right now and how to set up a space for discussion with 3rd party users. I am considering creating a separate Third_party_users page instead of using my User page. I'm not sure what would be best. I have seen Sites using MediaWiki. A lot of the sites there are single wikis and Sumana and I discussed that we are more interested in MediaWiki-centered businesses than single wikis as they would be more likely to get involved. Single wikis might have been set up by somebody else and might not really know much about MediaWiki as a product and the number of single wikis is overwhelming. Do you think they should be included? Mitevam 16:52, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Don't get too obsessed about the name / location of the page. :) The table is good enough to leave your User space, yes. MediaWiki vendors is an obvious start. Isn't "Third_party_users" too generic? I'm a third party user myself with my pet project but this is a hobby, I'm clearly not a vendor. Ref Sites using MediaWiki I just wanted to make sure you know about it. I agree with you that it's only slightly relevant. You can link it from the vendors page, and vice versa.--Qgil (talk) 17:18, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
 * When you start new pages please add in order to have a more use friendly space for discussion. See for instance Talk:Groups/Proposals/Promotion. (By the way, you are invited to join that group since your work is clearly related)  :) --Qgil (talk) 17:21, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, I agree, don't be too generic: we already have lists of sites using MediaWiki, most importantly mutante's wikistats, what's valuable in your list is filtering to people who can give us new perspectives on what third party users really need. --Nemo 17:43, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Another area to think about: skins
A lot of people you talk to are going to want to change the appearance of MediaWiki. A common issue is "How do I hide this or that part of the UI?"

That, and there really isn't a good web-ui for configuring MediaWiki. We need something built-in (like WordPress) for updating MW, installing extensions and configuring the system. Chad wanted to do something like this but got swallowed up into Gerrit. Anyway, that is another pain point that we haven't really addressed yet. -- ☠ MarkAHershberger ☢ (talk) ☣ 15:45, 12 January 2013 (UTC)