Talk:Web APIs hub/Archive 1

General comments
There's an Engineering Community Team responsible for this, is this their proposal?

mediawiki.org is the hub of which you speak, and already has a Developer hub page and even a How to contribute for "developers beyond just coding MediaWiki", so it's unclear how this proposal differs from "do a better job on mw.org." Creating a new  seems like a non-starter, the way to improve a web site is rarely to start another one. Any proposal for a new site must comprehensively enumerate how it relates to existing wikis and what will become of their overlapping pages, and the bar is set high, appropriately.

It should be easier to present resources on mediawiki.org. In particular I think the external auto-generated documentation should be static read-only pages on mw.org; I'm sure there have been bugs and proposals for this. Especially the (new and cool) CSS "living style guide" for the desktop site needs to appear on this wiki in the developer's current choice of skin and Beta features.

The proposal mentions "be a friendly and inviting sandbox environment" but doesn't propose anything concrete. Again thinking about CSS, we could do more to let people make UX experiments; or is hacking around in a browser's developer console and then with s and s in a test wiki page enough of a sandbox?

-- S Page (WMF) (talk) 04:14, 7 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I just learned about this page thanks to a link from [BarebonesMediaWiki. I need some time to digest all this. I really appreciate getting help to improve our developer documentation, but I agree with S that we should discuss the plan before concluding that we need a microsite from developers. Even the concept of "Wikimedia Developer Hub" deserves some though. Do you think this is different from a "MediaWiki Developer Hub"? Let's talk, and let's push this good energy in the right direction!--Qgil (talk) 23:35, 8 January 2014 (UTC)


 * S Page (WMF),Qgil from Developer hub… "It is written for skilled LAMP developers who have experience using MediaWiki." I think there is overlap in the target audience but it is not necessarily the same. Perhaps the name is misleading, but the target for this is users of all types (not just skilled LAMP developers) who want to use wikimedia foundation data set or APIs to do interesting things.
 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 02:39, 23 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF): I agree. I've been finding it difficult to figure out the MediaWiki API (as a beginner with some programming experience). Even en:API:Sandbox is very complex and it's been hard for me to figure out where documentation is. I think that lowering the bar to entry is a very good idea. Fhocutt (talk) 20:54, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Fhocutt, great to hear (that you're interested, not that its hard now) Will you be at Zurich Hackathon or Wikimania? we'll be working on it at both places. Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 04:40, 3 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF): Unfortunately no, but I am hoping to be at WikiConference USA, and I'll be contributing as part of my upcoming internship (if I am chosen!).

terms
Unlike most of the linked reference sites, we don't enforce developer behaviors through a Terms of Use. To replace that, it probably will help to have a terms page somewhere mentioning licensing, rate-limiting, etc. Doesn't have to be terribly high profile or anything, but something to think about including in the design.

Currently all we really have is a single legal page on dumps.wikimedia.org, which I'm surprisingly OK with content-wise, but is pretty hard to find. LuisV (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 2 April 2014 (UTC)