Since I and @KCVelaga are the current designated contact person for Wikimedia Foundation. I give my consent for user group website. Now looking forward to KCVelaga's consent.

I agree.

@Jayprakash12345 Please follow the instructions in the wiki creation form: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/91/, and amend the taks description according to the form. Thanks!

Thank you @Urbanecm for pointing over this. Information added according to form :)

Change 655078 had a related patch set uploaded (by Gerrit maintenance bot; owner: Gerrit maintenance bot):
[analytics/refinery@master] Add in-tech.wikimedia to pageview whitelist

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/655078

Can I ask why this needs a new wiki?

It's starting a new prescedent of more specific usersgroups getting wikis under the wikimedia.org domain...

In T271539#6731806, @Reedy wrote:

Can I ask why this needs a new wiki?

As you know, Meta-Wiki is a public wiki that allows everyone to edit. That allow bad users to modify Annual Report, Meeting notes, even votings etc. To prevent this, Most User groups prefer different wiki instead of Meta-Wiki.

When things come like partnerships then this is a user group responsibility to share reliable source. Like Wikipedia, MetaWiki can't be reliable.

It doesn't explain why it needs to be ether Wikimedia hosted, and/or under the wikimedia.org domain

I think all the other "user group" wikis are more like chapters etc currently.

Doing this starts a precedent of "I want a wiki for my usergroup. They got one, why can't I?". And there's quite a few usergroups

This feels to me like if this is something we're going to do, they probably shouldn't be under wikimedia.org

FWIW. I'm not saying you can't have a WMF hostsed wiki.

I'm just saying maybe a bit more thought should be put into this sort of request, and especially before we create yet another wiki under wikimedia.org

In T271539#6731935, @Reedy wrote:

[...]
I think all the other "user group" wikis are more like chapters etc currently.

Doing this starts a precedent of "I want a wiki for my usergroup. They got one, why can't I?". And there's quite a few usergroups

If the requesting usergroup is a recognized Wikimedia affiliate, well, why not?

This feels to me like if this is something we're going to do, they probably shouldn't be under wikimedia.org

Why not? Which domain would you suggest instead?

Just because we can, doesn't mean that we should.

You've got to realise that creating a load of wikis is not free, it doesn't necessarily scale, and it results in more work for numerous teams. Then the wikis often get abandoned, moved elsewhere etc, leaving more tech debt behind.

What if tomorrow (yes, this is hyperbole), 100 other UG want wikis creating? We then add 100 more wikis under wikimedia.org. The DBA's then over a 10% increase in the number of DBs they have to apply schema changes to.

Potentially get a new domain for this sort of thing? Using a sub sub domain maybe isn't the best idea with SSL certs (*.community.wikimedia.org or *.usergroup.wikimedia.org etc). I don't know. We know renaming and moving wikis is "hard", so let's try and prevent having to do that down the line.

Other cases (of Foundation programs) don't necessarily automatically get approved to have a *.wikimedia.org domain, sure in those cases they might be hosting things offsite, but still.

As wikimedia.org is technically the canonical domain for the movement, we should be wary of "polluting" it.

Maybe this is should be a wider discussion with SRE/Traffic about this sort of thing before we make a precedent by creating more.

In T271539#6731874, @Jayprakash12345 wrote:

In T271539#6731806, @Reedy wrote:

Can I ask why this needs a new wiki?

As you know, Meta-Wiki is a public wiki that allows everyone to edit. That allow bad users to modify Annual Report, Meeting notes, even votings etc. To prevent this, Most User groups prefer different wiki instead of Meta-Wiki.

When things come like partnerships then this is a user group responsibility to share reliable source. Like Wikipedia, MetaWiki can't be reliable.

How do other User Groups deal with this? Obviously, they don't have Wikimedia hosted specific wikis... And if this is a problem, presumably they found some solution...

Change 655078 merged by Joal:
[analytics/refinery@master] Add in-tech.wikimedia to pageview whitelist

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/655078

I tend to agree with Reedy here. Maybe this should indeed be something like wikimediausergroups.org but that would of course need much wider discussion.

That's a complicated situation. I think I know what's happening (correct me if I'm wrong). First, a history lesson:

WMF until 2012/2013 used to have only chapters. No thematic orgs (TO) nor user groups (UG). OTOH, getting a chapter status was rather easy and some chapters actually were so small that didn't build roots and became inactive (and got de-recognized later). To fix that and allow thematic interests to have a say too, the whole new system got introduced. Some notes on the new system:

• Becoming UG is easy but they can't get annual grants
• But OTOH, growing from a UG to a chapter or TO now has such a high bar that only one chapter (Wikimedia Korea) succeed that
• But UG is a fully recognized affiliation of WMF. For example they have a vote for the aff-elected board seats, same as big chapters.
• Not each UG is the same. Some are more active than small chapters, some are basically dead.
• There are two type of UGs (1- chapter-like that will become a chapter, 2- thematic ones that will become a TO) and in thematic UGs, there might be different needs (e.g. tech-related UGs might need a wiki for documentation, etc.)
• There are different levels of compliance among UGs, some are on verge of being de-recognized (and also de-recognizing a UG happens often too)

I think the problem is that the idea of "a Wikimedia wiki for each chapter" is outdated and was useful for the time we had chapters only (with medium-hardness to get a status). Now we have chapters and TOs (that are hard to get) and UGs (that are easy to get). My proposal is to find a proper and general fix for this by involving a broader audiences (specially including affcom and Asaf). My ideal solution would be that each wiki creation for UGs should be approved by affcom first (based on level of activity and compliance) so they check it for us on a case-by-case basis (similar to what langcom does for content wikis) but they definitely should agree to doing more work too :D I can start the discussion about it. Would it be fine for you @Dzahn and @Reedy?

In T271539#6732104, @Reedy wrote:

leaving more tech debt behind.

[Citation needed]. Can you point out some tech debt which is only created due to user groups site?

Then the wikis often get abandoned, moved elsewhere etc

Content management is responsibility of local wiki users, not developers.

In T271539#6733872, @Jayprakash12345 wrote:

In T271539#6732104, @Reedy wrote:

leaving more tech debt behind.

[Citation needed]. Can you point out some tech debt which is only created due to user groups site?

Any wiki is potential technical debt.

Deleting wikis isn't a simple process either

https://punjabi.wikimedia.org is a great example. T204477: Create punjabi.wikimedia.org for Punjabi Wikimedians User Group - the wiki has been created, it has literally never been used:

MariaDB [punjabiwikimedia]> select * from revision;
+--------+----------+----------------+-----------+----------------+----------------+-------------+---------+---------------+---------------------------------+
| rev_id | rev_page | rev_comment_id | rev_actor | rev_timestamp  | rev_minor_edit | rev_deleted | rev_len | rev_parent_id | rev_sha1                        |
+--------+----------+----------------+-----------+----------------+----------------+-------------+---------+---------------+---------------------------------+
|      1 |        1 |              0 |         0 | 20190415123257 |              0 |           0 |      56 |             0 | bqprczm8lobss2zf7legdgc92xg9p68 |
+--------+----------+----------------+-----------+----------------+----------------+-------------+---------+---------------+---------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

In T271539#6733872, @Jayprakash12345 wrote:

In T271539#6732104, @Reedy wrote:

Then the wikis often get abandoned, moved elsewhere etc

Content management is responsibility of local wiki users, not developers.

I never said it was. But it's "developers" (and SRE/sysadmins) responsibility to keep them running and maintained (including things like schema changes).

While they may move it elsewhere, the wiki is still there for us to maintain, until it's eventually properly retired

In T271539#6733857, @Ladsgroup wrote:

I think the problem is that the idea of "a Wikimedia wiki for each chapter" is outdated and was useful for the time we had chapters only (with medium-hardness to get a status). Now we have chapters and TOs (that are hard to get) and UGs (that are easy to get). My proposal is to find a proper and general fix for this by involving a broader audiences (specially including affcom and Asaf). My ideal solution would be that each wiki creation for UGs should be approved by affcom first (based on level of activity and compliance) so they check it for us on a case-by-case basis (similar to what langcom does for content wikis) but they definitely should agree to doing more work too :D I can start the discussion about it. Would it be fine for you @Dzahn and @Reedy?

I would definitely agree yeah. Just because someone asks for a wiki, doesn't mean they should get them. Same for new language wikis (in similar, but not exactly the same way). Certainly some input from someone like Asaf would be good.

I'd still argue a different domain would potentially be better too. Or at least have a proper discussion about that before creating more wikis under wikimedia.org which infinitely harder to rename, than creating them in the correct place, with the correct name in the first place. Even more so if there's potential of 10s (or eventually hundreds? maybe?) being under wikimedia.org

To me, something like wikimediausergroups.org (or many other potential names) could look better in terms of branding and such.

Sure, there's a bit of a cost of buying a domain (but it's in the scale of the cost of a few cups of coffee a year), but HTTPS certs are effectively "free" now with LE in Wikimedia usage.

No one is stopping pages being created on meta or wherever, so I don't believe blocking this on those discussions is a major ache. Sure they might get changed by others, but thankfully MW has a great history feature for reverting that sort of thing. And then exporting and moving them is easy.

If they really need their own wiki to work on, and do it now, and can't host it themselves, a wiki can be certainly be hosted in a Cloud-VPS or similar. And again, content can be exported at a later date.

In T271539#6731874, @Jayprakash12345 wrote:

As you know, Meta-Wiki is a public wiki that allows everyone to edit. That allow bad users to modify Annual Report, Meeting notes, even votings etc. To prevent this, Most User groups prefer different wiki instead of Meta-Wiki.

When things come like partnerships then this is a user group responsibility to share reliable source. Like Wikipedia, MetaWiki can't be reliable.

Given that this group is for MediaWiki developers, why is mediawiki.org not sufficient? I think we have enough admins that would revert vandalism from said "bad users".

Becoming UG is easy but they can't get annual grants

They can get annual grants but since user groups did not do activity on very large scale so they don't need much money. Example:- For doing Small wiki toolkits - South Asia 2021 throughout year. We need $983.75 only.

(and also de-recognizing a UG happens often too)

De-recognizing happen because they don't do three activities in a year and don't submit reports. In our case,

• T243695: Indic-TechCom: Create Oct-Dec 2019 Report
• T249109: Indic-TechCom: Create Jan-Mar 2020 Report
• T257152: Indic-TechCom: Create Apr-Jun 2020 Report
• T265802: Indic-TechCom: Create July-Sep 2020 Report
• T271454: Indic-TechCom: Create Oct-Dec 2020 Report

My proposal is to find a proper and general fix for this by involving a broader audiences (specially including affcom and Asaf)

Great idea.

There is one line explanation who are concerning about *.wikimedia.org that "Recognition from the Affiliations Committee allows a group to apply for using the Wikimedia trademarks and to get certain grants; - Wikimedia user groups. My Interpretation is *.wikimedia.org is also a kind of trademarks."

Above is just my interpretation and you will have your own Interpretation. So lets keep our interpretation with only us. Amir's plan good enough to solve it.

In T271539#6733887, @Legoktm wrote:

Given that this group is for MediaWiki developers, why is mediawiki.org not sufficient? I think we have enough admins that would revert vandalism from said "bad users".

I think you didn't understand. Let me give a chance to explain again. Goto Wikimedia trademarks or Visual identity guidelines. You will get "This page can be found at foundation:Wikimedia trademarks" or "foundation:Visual_identity_guidelines" link.

Why Wikimedia Foundation does believe their own MetaWiki infrastructure? When you will get the answer of this question then you will understand my point.

In T271539#6733941, @Jayprakash12345 wrote:

In T271539#6733887, @Legoktm wrote:

Given that this group is for MediaWiki developers, why is mediawiki.org not sufficient? I think we have enough admins that would revert vandalism from said "bad users".

Wow :) I think you didn't understand. Let me give a chance to explain again. Goto Wikimedia trademarks or Visual identity guidelines. You will get "This page can be found at foundation:Wikimedia trademarks" or "foundation:Visual_identity_guidelines" link.

Do you know this useful feature called page protection?

In T271539#6733901, @Jayprakash12345 wrote:

Becoming UG is easy but they can't get annual grants

They can get annual grants but since user groups did not do activity on very large scale so they don't need much money. Example:- For doing Small wiki toolkits - South Asia 2021 throughout year. We need $983.75 only.

That's not an annual grant. It's a rapid grant and yeah UGs can have get project grants (or other types of grants, for example IEG which is now deprecated in favor of other types) but they can't get APG. At least when I was a representative of a UG, it wasn't possible (and can't find a UG among the ones applying for APG either).

(and also de-recognizing a UG happens often too)

De-recognizing happen because they don't do three activities in a year and don't submit reports. In our case,

No, it can also happen due to conflicts and other issues, It has happened before.

In T271539#6733883, @Reedy wrote:

I would definitely agree yeah. Just because someone asks for a wiki, doesn't mean they should get them. Same for new language wikis (in similar, but not exactly the same way). Certainly some input from someone like Asaf would be good.

I'd still argue a different domain would potentially be better too. Or at least have a proper discussion about that before creating more wikis under wikimedia.org which infinitely harder to rename, than creating them in the correct place, with the correct name in the first place. Even more so if there's potential of 10s (or eventually hundreds? maybe?) being under wikimedia.org

To me, something like wikimediausergroups.org (or many other potential names) could look better in terms of branding and such.

Sure, there's a bit of a cost of buying a domain (but it's in the scale of the cost of a few cups of coffee a year), but HTTPS certs are effectively "free" now with LE in Wikimedia usage.

No one is stopping pages being created on meta or wherever, so I don't believe blocking this on those discussions is a major ache. Sure they might get changed by others, but thankfully MW has a great history feature for reverting that sort of thing. And then exporting and moving them is easy.

If they really need their own wiki to work on, and do it now, and can't host it themselves, a wiki can be certainly be hosted in a Cloud-VPS or similar. And again, content can be exported at a later date.

My biggest problem is that UGs are extremely dynamic and might turn into a chapter/TO later and then they need to move a lot of pages to a new place which would also include redirecting lots of existing pages and URLs, etc. They might be used somewhere else as for example tr.wikimediausergroups.org and then all need to migrate to tr.wikimedia.org, etc.

In T271539#6733941, @Jayprakash12345 wrote:

Wow :) I think you didn't understand. Let me give a chance to explain again. Goto Wikimedia trademarks or Visual identity guidelines. You will get "This page can be found at foundation:Wikimedia trademarks" or "foundation:Visual_identity_guidelines" link.

Having a dedicated wiki for trademarks, and privacy statements has a legal reason. WMF is legally liable for these texts and for example vandalism go unnoticed there, it'll be a big issue. You don't have such issues.

Why Wikimedia Foundation does believe their own MetaWiki infrastructure????? When you will get the answer of this question then you will understand my point.

Also, not everything done in every part of WMF is correct and should be followed blindly

In T271539#6733887, @Legoktm wrote:

Given that this group is for MediaWiki developers, why is mediawiki.org not sufficient?

(In case if someone want to know "Why we are not on MediaWiki.org")

I set up User group page on MediaWiki.org before apply to AffCom. See https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Indic_Wikimedia_Technical_Association&action=edit&redlink=1. It ended up with deletion because per MKaur (WMF) she has internal instructions for checklist to check eligibility before forwarding to AffCom and according to the instructions new user group have to have MetaWiki page. We gave MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group page reference and requested to keep application with MediaWiki.org page. She declined and said that she can't do anything out of the instructions.

In T271539#6733943, @MF-Warburg wrote:

Do you know this useful feature called page protection?

!No, thank you very much for letting me know.

AIUI there are two concerns here:

• Security: a *.wikimedia.org wiki has a significant security surface (it can be used to poison CentralAuth cookies), so ideally this domain should be avoided. (SUL wikis pose even greater problems, but presumably this wouldn't be one?) In practice it is already handed out pretty liberally though, so I'm not sure it is fair to randomly decline requests based on that. It would be nice if the Security team came up with a consistent policy, though.
• Effort: Wikimedia is not a wikifarm where you can just set up a new wiki with a few clicks like Wikia etc. In an ideal world it would be, but that's just not the case today: setting up a new wiki takes significant manual effort, probably more than setting up a user group. Removing or renaming a wiki is even more effort. I think a rule like "a user group should only be able to request a wiki if it is old and active enough to become a chapter/thorg" would make sense. (I wouldn't require actually becoming a chapter/thorg because that means incorporation, which can be legally or politically problematic in some places.) Ie. at least two years of existence with a good track record of being active and providing reports, and 10+ members with 300+ edits and an at least 6 months old non-blocked account. I think the IMWDUG meets these.

(Brand was also mentioned but I don't see any particular problem there, as long as the wiki's own branding is not confusing.)

All that said, if the only reason you want a wiki is to prevent vandalism, that seems like a bad answer to a legitimate problem. A bunch of information about the group needs to be on meta anyway, because it is good for people searching information to have a predictable structure where all user groups can be found in the same place, so you need to fix the problem of meta vandalism anyway; and setting up a new wiki (with templates, gadgets, etc) is a significant effort and distraction. IMO a better approach would be to explain (here or in a dedicated, possibly non-public task) what are your problems with meta, and I'm sure we can figure out a better solution.

In T271539#6733957, @Jayprakash12345 wrote:

I set up User group page on MediaWiki.org before apply to AffCom. See https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Indic_Wikimedia_Technical_Association&action=edit&redlink=1. It ended up with deletion because per MKaur (WMF) she has internal instructions for checklist to check eligibility before forwarding to AffCom and according to the instructions new user group have to have MetaWiki page. We gave MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group page reference and requested to keep application with MediaWiki.org page. She declined and said that she can't do anything out of the instructions.

Yeah, not sure how MWStake got away with that. Having user group information randomly scattered between a number of wikis is definitely a bad situation. I would still set up a mediawiki.org page though, it just shouldn't be the "official" place for user group reports and such.

Just saying that I sent an email to affcom a couple of days ago and they said they are discussing this.

Hmm, any news from AffCom here?

my 2 cents: I think the real fix would be to get a separate domain name for just Wikimedia User groups. That needs discussion and manager escalation though of course.

meanwhile you could also create a wiki on https://miraheze.org (no ads and no cost)

Isn't one of Miraheze owners a WMF banned user?

Yes, John is.

In T271539#7171803, @Aklapper wrote:

Hmm, any news from AffCom here?

I had a chat with Camelia and emailed AffCom moments ago. This stuff has been stalled for more than a year and this needs resolution.

MKaur has said that she will follow up with AffCom on Monday and commits to sharing the update in the coming week.

I received a follow up from AffCom's Twitter handle. The response is from Camelia who says, "Hello, AffCom never managed the sites or had any decision making on this. And as the discussion went on that thread, only in the past chapters had this." But, I'm still waiting for MKaur's response because she just said two days back that she commits to sharing the update in the coming week. Lets see what happens. My question on this much is that, when AffCom had no decision making in this, why are we forcing them to have any?

This Meta page has mentions about these wikis from 2014 onwards; From where did it come? Community consensus? The diff I mention was made by @Varnent back on 24 April 2014. I feel instead of moving to AffCom, we should seriously try to find out the background and then try to solve the problem. If it was then by consensus/whatever reason, it can be continued further with the same rationale or otherwise abandoned with a similar idea.

@TheAafi Thanks. I do understand they never were the decision makers on sites for affiliations but that doesn't mean they can't be. Do they know the problem space well here? Do they know why we are asking them?

@Ladsgroup You're right but I'm not able to understand why AffCom is moving away from the discussion. The email I had sent them received a weird response in a language that I don't know. Let me reproduce it here for you:
Affiliations Committee Google Группы Логотип Google Групп
Запись, которую вы недавно отправили в группу Affiliations Committee, отклонена ее владельцем или менеджером.
Возможные причины отклонения:
Ваша запись лучше подходит для другой группы или обсуждения.
Ваша запись нарушает правила группы.
Запись недостаточно информативна.
Дополнительную информацию об инструментах модерации можно найти в Справочном центре Google Групп.
В Google Группах можно создавать и посещать онлайн-форумы, а также группы, общение в которых происходит по электронной почте. Делитесь с другими участниками документами, изображениями, календарями, приглашениями и прочими материалами. Подробнее…/

When my email had nothing that could violate anything. I sent an email because Camelia advised me to send one.

I got a follow up from MKaur and she said that, AffCom is actively passing an internal resolution on process related to such requests. You will hear from them soon.

Hello! I have update from AffCom. We have set all the criteria by which affiliates are eligible for their site. The text of the resolution is on Meta, please read it.

Thanks

In T271539#6733959, @Ladsgroup wrote:

This discussion is not going in a constructive direction. I write an email to AffCom + Asaf and Manavpreet for a general solution/criteria for UGs. In the meantime, creating this wiki (and all new wikis for UGs) is blocked until that discussion resolves to a tangible result.

I made a new attempt at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:FULBERT#affcom_re:_az.wikimedia.org because of the similar request at T306015 made me come back to this.

In T271539#8499536, @Dzahn wrote:

In T271539#6733959, @Ladsgroup wrote:

This discussion is not going in a constructive direction. I write an email to AffCom + Asaf and Manavpreet for a general solution/criteria for UGs. In the meantime, creating this wiki (and all new wikis for UGs) is blocked until that discussion resolves to a tangible result.

I made a new attempt at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:FULBERT#affcom_re:_az.wikimedia.org because of the similar request at T306015 made me come back to this.

@Dzahn it seems affcom made a resolution allowing some UGs but not all and it seems this UG doesn't fall under the criteria. So messaging doesn't really needed for indic mw devs UG. Read https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Resolutions/Wikimedia_wiki%27s_policy

This is exactly the reason why I have declined the task a few lines above.

In T271539#8499677, @Ladsgroup wrote:

@Dzahn it seems affcom made a resolution allowing some UGs but not all and it seems this UG doesn't fall under the criteria. So messaging doesn't really needed for indic mw devs UG. Read https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Resolutions/Wikimedia_wiki%27s_policy

ACK, though reading the policy it doesn't mean I could determine which wikis are covered by the policy and which are not.

So I am still wondering about T306015 which is what I pinged them about.

This is exactly the reason why I have declined the task a few lines above.

Yea, but I was asking them about the az.wikimedia.org wiki.

All I wanted is comment here that I made another attempt to get that policy.

Nothing told me there already was one meanwhile.