Submissions/How sitewide preferences get changed

After careful consideration, the programme committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2013 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August.

Submission no.: 5030
Subject no.: T1

Title of the submission: How sitewide preferences get changed

Type of submission: Presentation

Author of the submission: Rob Lanphier and Sam Reed

Country of origin: US and UK (respectively)

Affiliation: Wikimedia Foundation

E-mail address: roblawikimedia.org

Username: RobLa-WMF (talk)

Personal homepage or blog: meta:User:Robla-WMF and w:User:Reedy

Abstract: As an administrator of a Wikimedia wiki, you may wish to customize things not just for yourself, but for everyone who visits your wiki. In this presentation, we will explain how the process of wiki configuration changes works. We’ll cover the types of things that are likely to make your request go more smoothly, and teach you ways that you can help move things along if your request seems to be stuck. We’ll discuss how the process works after you submit your request, discussing how the WMF prioritizes the requests, and how we go about addressing the issues.

Detailed proposal

As an administrator of a Wikimedia wiki, you may wish to customize things not just for yourself, but for everyone who visits your wiki. A few examples of things administrators often ask for:

Changing the logo of the wiki
Temporarily lifting the limit on the number of people at a single location that can create new accounts (for events, for example)
Changing the name of a namespace, or adding a new namespace
Enable a MediaWiki extension that is deployed to the Wikimedia cluster, but hasn’t been enabled on your wiki yet.

In this presentation, we will explain how to take an idea for a site improvement of this type from idea to completion, including:

checking whether the functionality you want is available. We’ll show you how to ttake a look at other MediaWiki wikis and at mediawiki.org, and talk with us on IRC and on relevant mailing lists
checking whether that functionality is something you can just implement yourself, by importing a gadget or template
gathering consensus from your wiki’s community. Usually this would be via your village pumps and mailing lists; we’ll show you examples of what success looks like.
requesting the enhancement from Wikimedia Engineering via Bugzilla, our issue tracker
following up on Wikimedia Foundation’s requests for further information
informing your community of how to use the improvement, and customizing it for your wiki

We’ll cover the types of things that are likely to make your request go more smoothly, and teach you ways that you can help move things along if your request seems to be stuck. We’ll discuss how the process works after you submit your request, discussing how the WMF prioritizes the requests, and how we go about addressing the issues.

If you have particular questions or concerns over backlogged requests or difficulties you’ve had with this process in the past, please do bring them up during the question-and-answer session.

Track: Technology and Infrastructure

Length of presentation/talk: 25 minutes

Language of presentation/talk

English

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

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Willing to be the courageous non-techie to sign up first... Risker (talk) 03:31, 1 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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