One-wiki

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One wiki is the preference to use one W3C wiki rather than lots of individually siloed wikis per WG/IG/CG.

Advantages

  • Collaboration
    • Anyone from any WG/IG/CG can help
  • Allows for more serendipitous positive interactions
  • Being W3C-wide means anyone can fix typos
  • Lowers the barrier to people slowly helping with a WG/IG/CG
  • More people can indicate some level of interest without committing to joining / mailing list noise, etc.
  • Such incidental participation helps onramp people to greater participation
  • The more such "weak ties" we can encourage at W3C, across groups, the better the chance of harmony across W3C, at least socially / politically, which tends to be a good start towards technical harmony.

Disadvantages of silo wikis

Silo (per WG/IG/CG) wikis have several disadvantages:

  • Requires separate login approval barrier (which is sufficient for many incidental contributors to not bother with).
  • Discourages cross-W3C collaboration - e.g. cross-wiki links require absolute URLs rather than simple [[single-phrase-term]] wikilinks
  • Encourages tribalism

Possible Next Steps

  • Make the automatically generated home page for a (community) group link to a w3c-wiki page instead of a private wiki, as the default.
    • Only allow the option of a group-specific wiki by warning about the downsides and make the chair explicitly [x] ok to accept limitations etc.

See Also

  • AB - as this may relate to informal processes at W3C