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Liberating wikimediafoundation.org

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

This page documents what's needed in order to allow open editing (on a per-namespace basis) on wikimediafoundation.org and foundation.wikimedia.org.

Background

Currently, wikimediafoundation.org is run as a WordPress site, which does not allow any level of open editing or transparency.

foundation.wikimedia.org is one of a few fishbowl Wikimedia wikis. This means that account creation on this wiki is restricted; however all pages on the site are viewable by the outside world, much like a fishbowl.

Due to the closed nature of the site, it's possible to enable features on the site that would otherwise not be enabled. However, the closed nature of the site also means that discussion about policies and plans and anything else must take place off-site.

Proposition

wikimediafoundation.org should transition to MediaWiki, to allow a certain amount of participation by all users.

In order to better function as a wiki, at least the talk namespaces on both sites should be open to editing by all users.

Difficulties

For foundation.wikimedia.org, in no particular order:

  • raw HTML is currently allowed;
    • A list of pages that have raw HTML was generated at Raw HTML
  • uploading of various dangerous file types is currently allowed; and
  • the MediaWiki namespace is editable by any user.
    • Can easily be disabled by removing editinterface from the "user" group, however it may require making more users sysops, or a special "editinterface" group.

This list is by no means exhaustive. A thorough review of the configuration files at noc.wikimedia.org is needed to know what level of customizations wikimediafoundation.org has.

See also