@Krinkle The blog allows for categories and nested/subcategories, so in the backend of the blog, the teams are listed as subcategories under departments -- though it may not cover all of the subteams. When I post, I usually add all the categories and subcategories the post belongs to. I can add Parsing and add that as a category to the Parsoid post.

TBH I'm not fully comfortable with the categories as they are because they only cover WMF teams and those teams change enough that basing categories around them can be fraught. Also, since we want the blog to be welcoming to the entire community, it seems somewhat unfair to only have categories that are WMF teams. I'm happy to rethink the categories and their structure.

Personally I'd expect readers to care more about topics than ever-changing structures in some unnamed orgs. :)
Engineering seems to be some team in WMF's Product department; Technology seems to be some WMF department. Engineering is also a team in the Software-Entwicklung department of WMDE. And if WMSE gets more Utvecklare and Programmerare they might also create some team with some similar name.

Yeah, agreed about the topics vs structures -- at the same time, some posts do fit tidily under a structure type category.

This is all further complicated by the fact that the blog also has tags...

Maybe now that we are posting more and starting to better understand the workflows and the structure of the blog we should revisit this ticket? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T247272

For now, I removed the bigger/more general categories of Engineering and Technology from the posts and just left them with one category (right now the team or subteam the post is related to). I think we'll want to come to some decisions about categories sooner rather than later because as the number of posts grows it will take a bit of extra time to manually change these.

Thanks. Yeah, I think it would be clearer if the categories were flat and not reflective of the current internal org structure as much.

If we're going to flatten this, we should do it sooner rather than later as changing this will effectively cancel all subscriptions people have to these blog categories, e.g. in thier news reader or RSS reader apps.

For example, right now we have:
https://techblog.wikimedia.org/category/technology/engineering-productivity/performance/

And if you pass this to a news reader, it will internally discovered the "Feed" file currently located at https://techblog.wikimedia.org/category/technology/engineering-productivity/performance/feed/.

If we wait, then we'd probably want to set up a redirect of sorts. Redirects for post titles are simple in WordPress, but I'm less familiar with how feasible that is for feed URLs. Perhaps now is still early enough to not warrant that.

I'm thinking we should come up with a small number of big categories. I like what's been done on the Facebook and Github blogs:

https://engineering.fb.com/
https://github.blog/category/engineering/

This would make it easier for visitors to quickly parse the types of posts they want to explore. Like FB, we could do subcategories if we want to get more granular. Mostly we just need to decide on what we want the categories to be. I can change them in the blog admin and recategorize what is already there -- and yes, we should do it before we add much more content.

@srodlund Can we do this for the Performance Team as a start? I'd prefer we not publish T254335 until this is done, as that post has the potential to gain new subscribers outside our movement, some of which may subscribe to the Perf category specifically.

Changing the categories would break such subscription, unless you/we put in engineering effort to support aliases or redirects for them, which we can probably do without if we do it now :)

This would also make it more attrative to redirect our primary RSS feed at performance.wikimedia.org from our Phabircator Phame feed to this one, which I've been holding off on for now for the same reason.

@Krinkle, sorry I missed this and published the article today.

Let's put a pin in "Performance " and note to keep it as a big category going forward. The name/category "Performance" has the advantage of encompassing more than a team name and has potential topic coverage beyond the team itself. It should remain as a top-level category, even if the team name itself changed, and there is already a strong showing of articles that fit under this category.

I know I keep saying this -- but we do need to come up with a shortlist of big categories. Maybe 5 or 6, including "Performance."

Categories are disjunct, I assume? If this was just a buzzword game then I'd copy some random terms from my CV:

accessibility, artificial intelligence / machine learning, quality assurance and testing (ci, browser tests), code health / tech debt, datacenters, databases / mariadb, developer productivity, internationalization and language support, mobile, analytics and statistics, performance, API, security, design, search.

Hi All. It's been difficult to gather feedback on this, so I'm just going to be bold and add the following categories:

• Community
• Parsing
• Performance
• Research & analytics
• Machine learning
• Infrastructure
• Search
• Wikidata
• Cloud Services
• How To

Some of the current articles will be recategorized to fit this. Articles currently under performance will remain there.

I also added "Presentations" so that we can add conference, lighting, tech talks, etc

@srodlund: Hmm, Presentation and How To are content formats, while all the other categories are technology areas.
I'm not a fan of mixing that as categories are disjunct.

@Andre, I think it's okay because something can be in more than one category. So maybe people just want presentation or learning/how-to content or they want more technical content -- they can search by either.

Now that I've entered these though, I'm feeling conflicted about "infrastructure" because I'm not really sure what the coverage for it is, actually. It feels more like a buzzword than a category. I'd love input on a more general "technology" type category that isn't redundant because by nature of being published in a technical blog, all of the content is technically "technical." I think we should have something that broadly covers technical subjects and processes.

I'm wondering if we should have a "MediaWiki" category?

Also -- just a note that we can add other categories later. We just don't want to remove the categories we have.

In T250872#6269260, @srodlund wrote:

I think it's okay because something can be in more than one category.

Ah, I thought that was not possible. Thanks! Ignore then! :P