Forum:Starting a development forum

I would like to propose that we create a new subforum dedicated to wiki development discussions, similar to how the Dev Portal talk page has been used in the past. We've been moving steadily away from using project talk pages to conduct community discussions, and having a dedicated subforum for these kinds of discussions might make them more accessible to newer or less-experienced users. Additionally, there doesn't really exist, in the forums, a place to discuss ongoing developments or ideas without proposing a specific change or action. The way I see it, the new "Development forum" and the existing Community Discussions forum could work in tandem - an idea is proposed on the development side, and then a proposal to adopt it is introduced to Community Discussions once the idea is refined and ready for mass consumption. Alternately, an idea could be proposed on the Community Discussions forum, then shifted over to the Development forum once approved, to work on the idea's implementation.

To be clear, discussions on the Development forum wouldn't necessarily have to revolve around new features or new proposals. Discussions there could also revolve around, for example, template troubleshooting, adding new features to existing templates, or engaging in discussions of technical minutiae that don't necessarily fit neatly into the Community Discussions forum. The Community Discussions forum could then be more finely focused on "consensus-track" proposals and other sweeping large-scale changes; the kinds of discussions that need full community input, engagement and consensus before adopting. The Dev forum would be a place to work, more behind-the-scenes and without the need to strictly determine consensus before an action is taken.

So, I'm proposing that we create a new development-focused forum (we could call it the "Wiki Development" forum to be all-encompassing of what the forum would be for). We can take a look at existing threads currently in the Comm. Discussions forum, such as Forum:Adding Categories for aspirations or Forum:Looking to update age icons, and relocate those non-"consensus track" topics to the new forum. We would also archive and "close down" the current (basically unused) Development Portal talk page, and change wiki navigation to direct to the new forum for development discussions.

Thoughts? --  LostInRiverview talk · blog  ·  contribs 18:10, August 11, 2018 (UTC)


 * In light of Forum:Replacing the help desk, perhaps it wouldn't hurt to not use the old wiki-style DPL forums for this, and instead use a talk page like noticeboard to facilitate these discussions? Otherwise, given the use of the #technical channel on the Discord server, it would be good to have a more centralized location for the more technical, developmental aspects of the wiki. — k6ka  🍁 ( Talk ·  Contributions ) 15:48, February 16, 2019 (UTC)