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"

Problems:
 * different blogs → different accounts, permissions, RSS feeds, etc.
 * duplication of posts
 * other departments likely to want dedicated sections as well
 * expected growth: all departments likely to blog more and more as they grow: Community fellowships, India, etc.
 * 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
 * the current theme is... well, not that pretty
 * inconsistent coverage, depending on the size & composition of the teams, and willingness to communicate (add stats)

Proposed changes

 * proposed solution: merging wikimedia blogs, and using a magazine theme
 * "important" announcements could be placed into a "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.
 * another idea to explore: offering a blog hosting platform for staff? Staff should be encouraged to blog more about their work in order to increase transparency. Wordpress MU was merged with Wordpress 3.0 so we could have, for example, a platform called http://blogs.wikimedia.org with /name/ suffixes for individual blogs
 * add a small "status" box, linking to http://status.wikimedia.org in the future? 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)

Steps

 * Back up both blogs
 * Back up all URLs from the tech blog to
 * Import file attachments from the tech blog into the main blog's file architecture (after making sure they work the same)
 * Import articles from the tech blog to the main blog (as private / not published)
 * Clean up as needed (including categories)
 * Add redirects from old tech blog URLs to the new URLs on the main blog
 * Flip the switch