Hacking together: shared work for shared needs

Test copy of the proposal on semantic-mediawiki.org, used to test Template:AgendaDay26. Time slot and status are test values from the draft program.

Hacking together: shared work for shared needs (Discussion, 40 min, In-person, Accepted)

Speakers: Brooke Vibber · Start: 2026/11/13 10:05:00 · Conference: MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2026

How third-party MediaWiki users can work together on shared needs, reduce duplicated effort, and improve the usability baseline for MediaWiki beyond Wikimedia. Third-party MediaWiki users are a diverse bunch with a wide array of needs, some of them unique and some of them broadly shared. At MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group we're starting to talk about what we can all do together to share the burden of those common needs and raise the usability baseline of MediaWiki for its many users outside of its original home at Wikipedia/Wikimedia.

I hope to have an open discussion and solicit useful feedback on:

• What are the most immediate shared/common needs for MediaWiki core and extensions maintained by Wikimedia? (including data from initial survey results)
• Are there individuals and organizations who can provide developer resources in terms of labor (dev time) or money (pays labor, buys dev time) to help get those done?
• Are there areas there the coding labor is fine, but integration is difficult or communication has broken down, and how do we restart those?
• Eg are there process issues with MediaWiki core and extension development that are making it hard to get things done upstream? If so, find out who needs to poke whom to work it out between our various organizations.

My goal is to unblock some short-term work and encourage possibilities for more organized cross-org work on common needs for third-party MediaWiki users.