As discussed with qgil on IRC and email, filing request to create mediawiki-india list. This would act as a common email list for MediaWiki / Wikimedia related tech activities in India(Two of the recent ones in India - http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/wikipedia-hackathon-hyderabad and http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/mini-hackathon-delhi).
Such a list would tremendously help in building a local country wide community.
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Me (and I think, quim) believe so. To use an analogy, mediawiki-india would be analogous to wikitech-l, and wikimedia-india would be analogous to the current wikimedia-l.
Do feel free to make it wikitech-india instead of mediawiki-india if you think that'd be clearer.
OK, I have no objection to either name, with a preference for wikitech-india. I leave it to Thehelpfulone to create and leave the decision with him and whatever is agreed to here. :)
pb
I actually have a strong opinion for the formula mediawiki-COUNTRY. :) It relates to "MediaWiki Groups", a denomination that has been agreed with the AffCom: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Groups
We want to keep these groups really local, e.g. to territories you can cover in a few hours to attend a meetup. We started discussing with Yuvi about this mailing list for India when I suggested it as an alternative to his proposal for "MediaWiki Group India", a precedent we don't want to create right now.
A main purpose of these lists and groups is to reach out to new technical contributors of the MediaWiki community and the Wikimedia movement. "wikitech" only means something for a bunch of insiders like us. For the rest is a vague term e.g. "discussion about wiki technology". "MediaWiki" appears at the footer of every single Wikipedia page as "powered by": a more precise starting point.
I can discuss further if you are still not convinced. :)
About the creation of mediawiki-COUNTRY lists, I believe they are useful for the case of countries like India, with a huge territory and a lot of initial difficulties to have critical mass in a single place for a local MediaWiki group. The idea is that such list can help as a landing place for potential and actual technical contributors without any group in hundreds of km around. If the health of the list is good other contributors might show up and other cities might get that critical mass for a local group later on.
Let me know if you need more background to make the right decision. Thanks!
Thehelpfulonewiki wrote:
Thanks Quim, your reasoning was enough to convince me that MediaWiki-India would be more appropriate in this case. I've gone ahead and created the list, which is publicly archived and has an open subscription and set yourself and Yuvi as the list administrators (check your email for the list admin password).
The list info page is at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-india.
Thank you!
Yuvi, as soon as you add the description and test the list with a welcome post... Please add the list to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mailing_lists and announce at wikitech-l and wikimedia-india lists.
We will share the news through the MediaWiki social channels https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_media
After all this I will document the creation of these lists at the MediaWiki Groups page, although I don't expect many of these "national" lists coming...