MediaWiki Migration Poll

From iA wiki

I'm thinking of migrating this whole wiki to MediaWiki, the wiki engine used by Wikipedia, which has lots of cool features and allows me to designate some level of authority to the regular contributors, so that they can block spammers and the like.

It won't be a lot of work if we can deal with losing page histories. Importing page histories is a lot trickier, so I'm not going to commit myself to that. So under the condition that no page history will be preserved, I'd like to ask you, the active community of the infoAnarchy wiki, if you're OK with moving the site to MediaWiki.

Just sign your name under the option you prefer. I won't set a deadline for the poll - instead I'll just wait and see how many votes come in.

Yes

• schvin
• ABliss - If it will stop spam, if editing is improved and the upgrade does not alter content or formatting of the the current wiki, except for page histories, then I would be for a switch.
• dpi - Its a positive development to stop spam if it starts to become too annoying but grassroot efforts just don't last forever. If a project like this becomes too popular all kind of noise pops up making it unmanagable without creating a hierarchy. If either unmanagability or hierarchy becomes too apparant i think its time to quit. At least, that'd be my personal decision. Nevertheless i'm for the option giving it a go. I have no problem waiting a few weeks either but i'm wondering how to do that "revert" trick without doing a diff. How do you do that?

No

Other

• Webfork - the admin is currently working on a spam solution. If, in a few weeks (lets say the end of July), there has been no real progress, I absolutely encourage you to port the entire thing to MediaWiki. Its all in the public domain, there's nothing preventing you from doing so. However, I encrouage you to wait because this site currently has excellent Google rankings (one of the reasons we're being targeted for spam) and moving or mirroring it elsewhere might screw that up, at which point we're hurting the whole point and benefit of the Wiki system. Thank you for the offer.

Erm, "the admin"? That would either be me or George, and I started the poll. What do you mean? -Erik

Erik--Webfork and I have been discussing various spam work arounds. Webfork: Erik is definitely the admin ;] I think we'd definitely (at worst) make redirects that make the google links work as they have in the past. I have to double-check, but I'm pretty sure I can make it transparent so the names stay the base links stay the same... what is your take on that subject, Erik? -schvin

I appreciate both of your work done on iA but my concern is that I've done a lot of work as well and now its being attacked to some degree. We are at a crossroads, certainly. Spam has always been an element here but only recently has become so prominent that its now distracting from my/our work. Unlike some other folks here, I haven't found a place on infoanarchy.org's core site (only the wiki) so removing the wiki from iA isn't as traumatic as it might be for some. All I really care about is preserving the simplicity, technical-centric nature, Google rankings, and good moderators of the iA wiki. If you can preserve these things in a move as well as stop spam to some effective degree, then by all means you have my vote.

I also have another sysadmin friend who has volunteered his time and energy if you want to toss me your Apache logs or need a perl script worked up. I've gone over much of this with George. But seriously, whatever works is fine with me. I'm willing to put time and effort into the preservation of something as cool as this wiki. Webfork

I agree on all your points, Webfork, definitely were not thinking of moving the wiki or changing the structure, etc. -schvin

Sounds good - go for it. Webfork