Perth Airport
· WikiCon 2023 ·
I'm trying to figure (yet again) out how "self-contained" a website should be. MediaWiki by default is fairly opinionated about this, and wants all data and attachments to be stored within itself — with the notable exception of InstantCommons, which makes it possible to show files from Wikimedia Commons; other than that there's no text, images, or other files that get loaded from any external place. For a long time I thought that this was a good approach, avoiding issues with other resources going offline etc., but then a few years ago switched to almost the opposite: that it's better for a site to pull in lots of stuff from everywhere, and to have various parts of it use different services. That way, if anything fails the whole thing doesn't go away.
This morning I'm en route to Brisbane for WikiCon 2023, the 2nd such national gathering we've had for the Australian Wikimedia community. Although 3rd really, because last year's ESEAP conference in Sydney was pretty much also our national thing.