Website maintenance volunteers?

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2007 at 04:29:32PM -0800, Barton C Massey wrote:
> I'm not sure what the status is of embedding arbitrary HTML
> in MW pages; any wiki that doesn't let me do that is a
> non-starter for me, as the wacky markup languages that most
> things support just aren't powerful enough for the corner
> cases.  I know there are potential XSS issues, but see the
> next paragraph...

MW will permit users to embed some HTML in pages; some is tidied out as
"unsafe".  I believe the list is configurable.

> The big showstoppers for MW, as I see it, are
> severalfold. (1) Hosting: AFAIK no one at freedesktop.org,
> with its limited staff resources, is very excited about
> trying to maintain a complex and evolving PHP/SQL app.

I've run MW.  On the scale X.org will need, there's effectively no
administration work at all, in the backend.  The wiki itself will need
a few watchers, of course.

> 2) Content conversion: AFAIK there is no automated way to move
> our Moin content over.

David Greaves used to host wiki.mythtv.org on Moin; scripts were writen
to port it to MW.  If it becomes useful, I can grab those scripts from
him; ISTR they worked pretty decently.

>                          (3) Experience: Unless someone with
> experience running MW sites steps up and volunteers to run
> the whole mess, I don't think we have anybody already signed
> up who's done that.

It's not all that difficult to wrangle a Mediawiki site; as I note
above, keeping the engine working is pretty trivial, but the
above-the-line work isn't too bad either.

>                       (4) Target: MW really isn't designed
> for technical development work.  It's got quite a bit of
> structure, and some of that structure seems to me
> inappropriate for what we're 

Doing, presumably.  I haven't dug very deeply into x.org, but IME, MW
can be stretched to do quite a bit of non-obvious stuff, out of the
box.  And, of course, there's Wikipedia from which to steal
implementations of cool stuff, if you need it and can't think up how to
do it on your own.

> I think MW is a definite possibility, but I'd like to see
> these issues addressed.  On all of the counts above, I think
> that ikiwiki is superior.  I agree that sticking with Moin
> is a possibility, and I agree with those who say the problem
> is more content than delivery infrastructure.  Daniel's
> argument as I understand it, though, is that perhaps more
> folks would be willing to work on the content if they didn't
> have to do it through the horrid wiki-editing interface. 

I haven't worked on the current wiki, but I did do some work on the
Myth wiki while it was still on Moin, and I was, in fact, not as
impressed with the interaction as I was with MW, which was one of the
reasons that I was the chief agitator for the switch.

Isaac, the project lead there, is allergic to extra infrastructural
work, and I don't recall that he's had to do anything more strenuous
than turn on "only registered users can post", in the 2 years-ish since
it went in.

> I can speak from personal experience here, and say that I have
> done much more and more rapid content development and
> maintenance under ikiwiki than any of the several other
> systems I've worked with, for precisely this reason.
> 
> > and about git updating a page under ikiwiki, seriously
> > ;-0....  (you might was well just put the website home
> > directory under git)
> 
> I have no idea what you mean by all this.  I certainly have
> lots of web pages that are git-controlled outside of any
> wiki---what's the problem?  Ikiwiki provides some
> convenience and wiki-style editing on top of this mechanism;
> this is a good thing, no?  Or are you just referring to the
> fact that git+ikiwiki seems to hose itself fairly frequently
> and painfully, which I have to agree with...

I think he was guffawing at the idea of far-offline wiki editing, in
general, and I'm not sure I disagree with him.  Near-offline, maybe.

> Anyway, thanks to all for the feedback!  I'm probably going
> to try to do something about it once we've reached enough
> consensus that I can decide what that something should
> be---so keep those cards and letters coming!

Sure.

As I noted to Daniel off list, I'd be happy to contribute whatever I
can in the vein of site management; I have some little experience in
that from several years contributing to WP as well as the
wiki.mythtv.org work and setting up bestpractices.wikia.com.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
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