@20after4

Instead of just putting it out there and letting it either succeed or fail based on the merits, there is a lot of bureaucracy around consensus building. Sadly it's just the way things are with a community/organization as large and as socialistic as Wikimedia has become.

I can relate to that. We hardly can change the social structure, but we can change the technical side. This is why I made Convenient Discussions, which contributed to speeding up the processes in communities where it was used. No more pain of meticulously editing wikitext to participate in discussions. Wikipedia has "wiki" in its name meaning "fast" in Hawaiian.

BTW, check this out, the Developer Satisfaction Survey is just out; there is a section on Phabricator there, and we see some evidence very much supporting the hypotheses I mentioned:

• Almost everybody use Phabricator: {F2157279}
• Shared space for staff and volunteers is what people value in Phabricator: {F2157280}

Alright, more questions arise as we discuss this in increasing detail, so I guess we should continue at an appropriate platform once and if this moves forward.

@aklapper

I think this would need a huge huge discussion across Wikimedia communities which nobody has the capacity to plan and lead (my personal interpretation) in order to get to a rough concensus.

I'm also not sure you correctly interpret the premise, because what I fancy is quite limited in scope: it's supposed to be a (pretty organic IMO) development of what already exists on Phabricator and not part of some kind of great migration of Wikimedia communities to Phabricator to discuss technical issues. (Again, I can't even say confidently that there is something to migrate – questions that are of relevance to developers as opposed to end users are hardly even discussed on wikis.) I agree though that what was planned as limited in scope could grow out of it, so this should be agreed upon in advance.

The answer to "What's the alternative?" comes at the end of a long process

(Right, but I'm responding to your opinion which also comes before the end of that process, and this question is supposed to be a part of the information-gathering phase of that long process which you're kind of deflecting even though I value your perspective.)

@aklapper

Part of the argumentation is based on a wrong assumption as Wikimedia Phabricator is not "used in numbers". Please compare the number of Wikimedia wiki editors and Wikimedia Phabricator users (minus some developers only). There are still many on-wiki folks who are uncomfortable using Wikimedia Phabricator.

But what is the alternative, on-wiki discussions? Does this actually work or can it? E.g. I have a question about a class of OOUI. Where do I go?

• Talk page that discusses that specific component (e.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:OOUI/Windows/Process_Dialogs)?
• Main talk page of OOUI?
• Extension talk page?
• Some things also have pages on local wikis (and, as a discussant on such a wiki, you often have to say to people "Hey, this is not discussed here, the devs responsible don't visit this page").

And how probable it is that right people will come across that topic? Especially if the question is esoteric, and only few people know how the component works. The devs who write them are often more known by their Gerrit/Phabricator handles, not wiki accounts.

@20after4 Thanks for the response. Integration with search is something I overlooked, but you're right; tasks can naturally come from questions, and questions can naturally come from tasks. Their joint discoverability and interplay is a fertile soil for education and development. As volunteers, our role is kind of limited in many cases to being passive recipients of what is decided in WMF internal communications. Having public discussions of components could add more dynamism to the process.

But this is the exact reason I started to consider Ponder? Because all previous attempts implied fragmentation, while Ponder is integrated in the system people already use (Phabricator), both developers and volunteers, and in numbers. I've explained in more details how I see the current situation at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SDeckelmann-WMF#c-Iniquity-20240420234600-JWBTH-20240418220000. Please share your view if you'd like.