Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: killing mediawiki

[William Hubbs]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 09:09:16PM +0100, M. J. Everitt wrote:
> On 03/07/18 21:01, William Hubbs wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 09:20:53PM +0200, Jonas Stein wrote:
> >>> I don't care that we have a wiki, but can we please look into killing
> >>> mediawiki and look at something with a git backend?
> >> I think the wiki is very useful and should remain.
> > Like I said, there are wiki packages out there like gollum, ikiwiki, and
> > probably others which would allow editing of content via text files and
> > use vcs's for version control of the changes, so I'm not advocating for
> > shutting down the wiki. I think we should have one that is more
> > accessible to users who want to use different interfaces. We shouldn't
> > be forcing users to use a full web browser just to contribute to the
> > wiki.
> >
> >>> It would be very nice to be able to edit wiki pages in markdown or another similar format
> >>> and use git to control the changes instead of editing in a browser.
> >> I think it is more efficient to convert your yearly contributions to the
> >> wiki [1] manually from markdown to mediawiki, instead to convert the
> >> existent wiki pages to anything plus setup a new engine and configure
> >> user accounts.
> > If that is converted from markdown, all you would have to do is use the
> > markdown directly if the new wiki supports it.
> >
> >> Btw: Would a conversion to another wiki mean that we get another long
> >> footer on every wikipage "This page was edited by... do not remove..."?
> > I have no idea about that, but that alone shouldn't stop this from
> > happening.
> >
> >> For the special case of the Gentoo Manual:
> >> I think the Gentoo Manual is better maintained in a git repository,
> >> because it was initially written like a book and sometimes it is better
> >> to make PRs for the manual.
> > I don't really see the manual as a special case. We should use the same
> > interface for everything.
> >
> > William
> 1) I think this idea was floated before, and failed before ..

That's not a reason for not floating it again.

> 2) Existing wiki team are badly understaffed, how would this improve
> things? How would new maintainers be registered and managed?

It improves things by offering more flexable ways for users to edit the
wiki. if you want to use a browser you can, or you can use something
like git and edit the content that way.

I don't know for sure how maintainers would be registered and managed,
but I don't know that on mw either.

> 3) Are you volunteering to implement this change yourself (infra are
> equally understaffed) and manage the change and transition, in addition
> to your existing commitments?

I'm not on the infra team, so I would have to be added there to be able
to do it I guess, but I would be willing to assist if I could.

William