Requests for comment/Add developer link to footer of Wikimedia wikis

This page is mostly just notes related to 33464.

Position
The current footer links at https://en.wikipedia.org/ look like:

Contact us Privacy policy  About Wikipedia   Disclaimers   Mobile view

There seems to be wide agreement that adding the link after "Mobile view" would be best for now.

Why not use the "Powered By MediaWiki" button? That button is intended to advertise MediaWiki. This new link is intended to draw in developers who want to contribute code or re-use Wikimedia's content in their own projects.

Label

 * API
 * Developer Central
 * Developer hub
 * Developers
 * Get involved
 * Wikimedia developer hub

Destination

 * mw:API:Main page
 * Developer hub (Wikimedia developer hub)
 * Developer hub
 * Get involved
 * mw:Help:Contents
 * How to become a MediaWiki hacker
 * mw:Manual:Contents
 * MediaWiki
 * mw:Project:Help
 * Sysadmin hub
 * User hub
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php

Examples

 * https://dev.twitter.com/
 * https://developers.facebook.com/
 * http://developer.wordnik.com/
 * http://www.flickr.com/services/developer/

Content
Items to possibly include or exclude:
 * m:Research:Index
 * Wikimedia update feed service
 * Data dumps
 * Tech
 * mw:API:Main page
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php
 * Special:ApiSandbox
 * Code samples
 * mw:User:Sumanah/ApiDocsImprovement
 * Annoying little bugs
 * mw:API:Tutorial
 * Gadget kitchen
 * mw:Manual:Skins
 * mw:Manual:Extensions
 * https://bugs.mediawiki.org (filing and fixing!)
 * GitHub
 * Pretty icons similar to http://developer.wordnik.com
 * Pretty icons similar to http://developer.wordnik.com

Implementation

 * Must be translatable!

Idea 1
First, split by motivation:


 * I'm a developer. I want to:
 * re-use data from Wikimedia wikis for my own project; or
 * contribute code to Wikimedia wikis.

For the first branch ("re-use data"):
 * Possibilities
 * API
 * Data dumps
 * Squid cache
 * Toolserver
 * Wikimedia Labs
 * HTML dumps
 * For each possibility, explain issues with:
 * Speed (Toolserver replication is crazy fast; scanning dumps is super-slow)
 * Data currency (dumps are old; API is freshest)
 * Hosting (host yourself; host elsewhere [Labs and Toolserver])

For the second branch ("contribute code"):
 * I'm interested in or want to learn more about:
 * By programming language:
 * Lua/wiki templates --> Scribunto
 * JavaScript/CSS --> Gadgets
 * Puppet, LDAP, Apache, other shit --> operations part of Git
 * PHP --> MediaWiki extensions; patches to MediaWiki!; code review!
 * Python, Perl, etc. --> bots
 * C# and whatever --> Huggle, AWB, etc.
 * By part of the software:
 * User interface for everyone
 * User interface for specific tasks/people/etc.
 * Operations/system administration --> operations part of Git again
 * Other parts

Then have a "I'm confused and need help" section with links:
 * Mailing lists
 * IRC
 * Help page on-wiki
 * Tech (tech village pump)

Other entry points

 * http://developer.wikimedia.org/
 * http://developer.wikipedia.org/
 * http://developer.mediawiki.org