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Proposing creation of a developers list for India
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Description

Author: anirudhsbh

Description:
Hi Casey,

Proposed name of the list: wikimedia-in-dev
Proposed list admin: anirudhsbh@gmail.com

Public archives, subscription should be free, listed on the info page.


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal

Details

Reference
bz26436

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Lowest.Nov 21 2014, 11:16 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz26436.

Out of curiosity, developer as in mediawiki programmer and/or wikimedia sysadmin, or some other meaning of the word developer. If the former, why the need for a separate list? If the latter, perhaps it should be named something else to avoid confusion.

anirudhsbh wrote:

The discussions would be centered around Indic language localization and more. I don't think the larger mediawiki community would be interested in this.

anirudhsbh wrote:

The proposal is to create a mailing list for Mediawiki developers in India (so, the former applies here). Alternatively, the name of the list could be wikimedia-in-tech.

In that case I don't have any issue with the name. At first i thought the list was going to be about developing a stronger presence in india (or some other type of thing that would be split off from a foundation-l type mailing list)

I'm unsure if there'd be enough traffic for such a list, since the already existing mediawiki-i18n list (who'd presumably be interested in this sort of thing) only gets about 3 messages a month. But then again, I don't really know whats going on on that side of things, so perhaps such a list is appropriate.

hpnadig wrote:

*** Bug 26445 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

hpnadig wrote:

There's a decent crowd interested in this. There were several developers who
met with Danese and others at Pune, there are Wikipedians who're developers
who'd want to help solve some of the issues that are affecting Indian language
projects.

Like I said in the other issue, I'm a bit afraid of fragmentation. There are bound to be people who don't know that such list exists, like me before I noticed this issue.

anirudhsbh wrote:

Sure, we don't expect the list membership to grow exponentially in the initial days. There were a large number of people at the FOSS conference who expressed interest in Mediawiki development after Erik Moeller conducted a workshop along with other Bangalore volunteers.

But we do wish to see more participation from the open-source community focusing on localization and specially PHP developers in India; and this could be the right platform for that.

This list will also help existing technical folks across several Indic wiki projects to share useful userscripts,tools specific to Indic wikis which help wikiprojects. As such these people from different wiki's dont communicate at all since there is no common platform and sometimes redo stuff which has already been there on another language wiki.

This will also help us reaching out to people/students in helping out Indic wiki with technical solutions.

bugs wrote:

(In reply to comment #7)

Like I said in the other issue, I'm a bit afraid of fragmentation. There are
bound to be people who don't know that such list exists, like me before I
noticed this issue.

These were my thoughts too. Is there a reason that this type of discussion couldn't take place on wikimediaindia-l, mediawiki-i18n, or wikitech-l? Usually we only create specialized lists like this when there's too much traffic on a list that we need to split it.

Is there really anything that Indian users here would be working on that wouldn't apply to other wikis?

hpnadig wrote:

(In reply to comment #10)

Is there really anything that Indian users here would be working on that
wouldn't apply to other wikis?

Pretty much. The developers would be working on improving Indic input on Wikipedia, writing extensions specific to improving Indian language projects.

In that case, surely it'd be beneficial to use wikitech-l? Presumably these would be all new developers that are not familiar with they way things work in the mediawiki community. If they develop these extensions in total isolation on their own list, they won't get useful feedback from experienced devs, which will probably decrease the chance of their extensions being deployed (or I imagine it would anyways).

tinucherian wrote:

IMHO, there is a need a seperate alias for mediawiki and related tools related to Indic languages. Wikimediaindia-l is a generic list which as of now shouldn't be used for pure technical mails. This new co-ordination mail will also help attract a lot of developer community in India.
"wikimedia-in-tech" is better name , if you ask me.

hpnadig wrote:

(In reply to comment #12)

In that case, surely it'd be beneficial to use wikitech-l? Presumably these
would be all new developers that are not familiar with they way things work in
the mediawiki community. If they develop these extensions in total isolation on
their own list, they won't get useful feedback from experienced devs, which
will probably decrease the chance of their extensions being deployed (or I
imagine it would anyways).

Like Anirudh mentioned earlier on this thread, the larger Mediawiki community may not be interested in this. Moreover, the traffic can get quite large as more and more city meet-ups happen here in India.

tinucherian wrote:

Any action on this ? This request is open for some time ...

Given to Ashar so something happens.

bugs wrote:

(In reply to comment #15)

Any action on this ? This request is open for some time ...

The consensus seems to be against unnecessary fragmentation. Let's make use of the existing lists first (MediaWiki-l, Wikitech-l, WikimediaIndia-l, etc. whatever makes the most sense for the subject), and then re-evaluate creating another list if it becomes necessary.

shijualex wrote:

I too feel that there is no need of separate mailing list for Indian Developers. Let the interested developers join one of the available options and start contributing to the movement.

Closing the bug as WONTFIX per comment c17.