Website maintenance volunteers?

[Barton C Massey]

In message <226dee610711300409y6e6e2681h6509243538e37d90 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> I agree with Bryce here Mediawiki is _the_ way to go.
> 
> http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/MediaWiki+MoinMoin
> http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/ikiwiki+MediaWiki

Thanks much for the informative links!  I'm not sure what
the latter link should tell me, though, other than that both
seem to be fairly capable wikis.

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...

I agree that spam fighting isn't much of an issue for us,
and captchas are an almost complete non-issue; it's unlikely
we'll be letting anyone but X.Org members edit our wiki
anytime soon, and we certainly we have control of what the
members are doing.

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


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
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...

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!

    Bart Massey
    bart at cs.pdx.edu