Page MenuHomePhabricator

Make Phabricator "Creating and renaming projects" documentation page less confusing for people who want to have a project
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Creating_and_renaming_projects is still complex enough that many people fail to follow all these guidelines. Recent examples are in T103700 and T118105.

Can we more often / better avoid that corrections need to be made?

I propose to have a checklist on that page which people who want to have a project can follow.

Basically (please edit / improve):

So you want a project?


Add to "Name" section on wikipage: as the entire community shares Phabricator's flat "Projects" namespace
Add to "Description" section on wikipage: should allow everybody, also outside Wikimedia, to clearly understand what the project is about. Adding links to more info (e.g. wikipages) is strongly encouraged.

Event Timeline

Aklapper raised the priority of this task from to Medium.
Aklapper updated the task description. (Show Details)
Aklapper subscribed.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Creating_and_renaming_projects is still complex

Do we really know that is the problem in both of the example cases?

No. But should that block us from making our guidelines easier to understand and to correctly follow? :)

Krenair set Security to None.

I didn't remove that line, but I still think we should actually check with @DarTar and @demon why they didn't follow the page before assuming it's because the page was too complex.

I think it is time to make this process as simple as wiki editing and handling of categories, now that we have very similar tools:

  • It is worth keeping the Project-Creators acl group with its very simple process for joining it, and reminding the guidelines to anybody joining.
  • It is worth having @Aklapper as phabmeister and whoever else is interested watching the creation of new projects.
  • If a project has been created with a minor problem (color / icon / not the best description...) the reasonable options are to just fix it (I have changed colors / icons of new projects on the fly) or to contact the project creator directly (Conpherence makes this very easy) asking them to fix it.
  • If a project created has more complex problems (potentially overlapping, do we need this, etc), then the problem can be reported in a new task.

Trying to enforce the guidelines the hard way is unnecessary. Public reprimands in tasks or IRC are definitely unnecessary. Sometimes people do mistakes. Sometimes they are busy and create projects on the fly (i.e. in the middle of a meeting, planning to get back to the new project afterward). Sometimes they are not aware that their creative exceptions, as innocent as they look individually, don't contribute to the general interest of consistency across Wikimedia Phabricator.

Just like MediaWiki categories, Phabricator projects are easy to edit, improve, archive. Bringing tension and stress around them is counterproductive.

Just like MediaWiki categories, Phabricator projects are easy to edit, improve, archive. Bringing tension and stress around them is counterproductive.

+1000

Very well said. I couldn't agree more with everything @Qgil has said above.

@Qgil

Many thanks for your suggestion - I like it!