Talk:Main Page
Future?
General
This Wiki was supposed to be migrated and moved, but due to a lack of
effort (for various reasons), I, Peter did not make this happen. Because
of this, the Wiki was down for a while earlier this year and has been
and can be regarded as deprecated.
So what to with this?
New solutions and old solutions for the problem this Wiki aimed to
solve are both "pad" (web-based collaborative real-time editor) based,
see
Commitments
I commit to keeping this site runnning until at least three months
after the next in-person CCC Congress or Camp best I can, which in all
likelihood will be November 2023 (after CAMP).
PHP issues have been solved in the simplest way possible, via
cronjob.
Alternatives to make sure that no content get's lost would be to
convert the contents of the Wiki (as is) to ZIM, as decribed here
How can you help?
Please offer ideas, chime in, tell me what would work for you. The
best way to do so is on this page. Thank you!
Peter (talk) 19:32, 22 April 2021
(CEST)
-
Hello, Peter. What do you mean by "the PHP daemon died"? Is
this wiki is running on a Debian-based or Arch-based Linux OS? Those
make it easier for servers running open-source software to stay running
and up-to-date. If a service goes down, the admin could write a bash
script that automatically restarts it. I'm guessing you know that
already. Most wiki software including DokuWiki require PHP too.
-
Three other bugs:
:# The filter form on RecentChanges doesn't load for me.
:# Neither does the filter form on page histories.
:# Footnotes and list-defined references didn't work when I tried to
use them for writing this comment.
-
Etherpad, HedgeDoc, etc. are fine for temporary and
personal markdown or text files, but they have much less
control than wikis do against spam. While they do have a learning curve
that stumps most bots, they have very limited or no support for access
control, user authentication, content moderation, etc. Many wiki
software do, including MediaWiki and DokuWiki via extensions. I can
suggest some extensions later.
-
Markdown is convenient for simple, temporary text files, but it's
cumbersome to read around inline formatting and links and scroll for
footnotes. Tables in markdown are ugly and can't be sorted easily by
column. Many different markdown standards exist that a given text file
could use that editors would have to learn, and even people just reading
are likely to have to learn what the formatting codes mean and would
probably be frustrated reading all the codes sprinkled throughout the
text. Etherpads make linking between pages a mess and searching a group
of pages impossible.
-
Wikis are the best tool for writing and archiving documentation,
tutorials, or journals. Their best features are not just collaborative
editing and revision control but linking documents, searching,
managing them, and offering most of their tools through a very easy
interface for new users. Links between pages are crucial for discovering
and organizing information and building a web of knowledge. Consider
your audience most of all.
-
I have several years of experience editing different MediaWikis,
DokuWikis, Trac wikis, and use Zim offline. I have a little bit of
experience using git, and I strongly oppose requiring git if you want
your readers to become editors. Its learning curve is extremely steep,
and it and its tools are not designed for being used as a wiki.
-
On Mastodon, you asked1 people to
get in touch with you if they "know some wiki platform that... has tools
to pull mediawiki content over". The keywords you want to search for are
"import" or "export". But if you compare
wiki software (2), you'll
find that MediaWiki itself has the most tools for importing and
exporting various formats, the most help documentation and tutorials,
and has extensions that are more refined and actively developed than
those of other wiki software.
-
As climate activism is a worldwide movement, I believe it deserves an
interlanguage wiki or family of language-based wikis or an embedded
feature that can translate page content in any browser that supports
JavaScript. MediaWiki has lots of experience, documentation, and
extensions for interlanguage wikis. Besides this wiki, the only other
wiki for climate activism that I know of is https://wiki.fridaysforfuture.is/,
but it's only in the German language and intended for the German chapter
of Fridays For Future.
-
This wiki is self-hosted, but if admins would rather a third party hosts
their wiki, here is a comparison of wiki hosting services. Miraheze looks
like it would be the best of those for climate activists, but it blocks
Tor.
-
I hope this message reaches you because I decline to give my e-mail
address to Matrix before it will allow me to connect to the channel, and
I don't want a Mastodon account associated with my activity on this
wiki. I use Tor Browser. That also gives me an unusual perspective about
the design of access controls. Thank you for allowing me, a Tor user, to
register here.
-
Spam management and content moderation
-
Delegate roles. Give Bureaucrat and Administrator rights (3)
(permission roles) to people you trust to review page revisions.
Copy-paste or import or link to as many features, templates, guideline
documents, or organizational policies as you want from Wikipedia and its
trove of help
pages (4) or
from other wikis that use open licenses. If you need reliable helpers,
advertise this wiki! Send direct toots to high-profile users of Mastodon
instances for the climate justice movement. Here are a few instances for
climate activism:56789
-
Block anonymous edits. (This wiki does.) Require a username to edit
pages (this wiki does) unless your wiki has a large population of
trusted, reliable, active editors who review revisions. On the
registration page, make it optional to supply an e-mail address or
social network account (this wiki does), but require completion
of a non-Google (non-tracking) Captcha or TextCha and/or a hold of 12 to
48 hours denying permission of the new account to edit pages of the main
namespace (as opposed to Talk pages or User pages). This is so that
editing is allowed without an e-mail or social network account and that
those wiki accounts will accumulate reputation so abusive accounts can
be dealt with more effectively than if they were IP addresses, even by
contributors who register through Tor. (This wiki uses a TextCha, but it
asked me the same question twice.) Wikipedia implements similar
restrictions on newly registered users until they are autoconfirmed.1011 New
accounts that remain inactive for, let's say, a week or two possibly
could be automatically deleted or blocked.1213
:* mediawikiwiki:Extension:ConfirmEdit
-
-
already active, using QuestyCaptcha. Sadly I have a hard time of
thinking of dumb questions to ask.
-
Disallow (not block) the basic editor account group
that has only basic permissions from committing extensive changes to a
page all at once in one revision. This is so people who
review other people's edits will not face being flooded by combined
changes lacking context for the smaller changes. In the world of git and
databases, these concerns led software project managers and reference
guides to recommend "atomic commits" although it may not have to be so
extreme on a wiki. In Trac, a bug tracker and wiki system, the threshold
to disallow a commit is rolled into a "karma" calculation14 for each commit to
the wiki (called a "submission" in Trac's documentation). Also related
is the derogatory usage of the term, "cowboy coding".
:* mediawikiwiki:Extension:AbuseFilter
:* The "edit_delta" variable
:* wikipedia:Wikipedia:Blocking policy
:* AbuseFilter
configurations in use by Wikimedia projects
-
There are other MediaWiki tools for editors that make it easier to
review and revert page edits, but they don't appear to be as urgently
needed for this wiki as spam management tools are.
-
By the way, remember to indent replies by prepending colons (:) to every
line of text like I did in the wikitext markup of this comment. Multiple
colons indents multiple tab-distances (:::::).
-
--Cefra (talk) 19:30, 28 October 2021
(CEST)
-
-
Thank you for your feedback! Sorry for not reacting for quite a long
time, but motivation was at rock bottom and ... it wasn't exactly a
short post, listing some things as measures to take that are (and were)
already in place.
-
I've finally deleted the spam accounts - tedious - and it does not
really make me like MediaWiki more, it really feels like it's stuck in
time and is very much it's own world. I hope to find the time to set up
some other recommendations.
-
Cheers,
-
--Peter (talk) 12:41, 15 October 2022
(CEST)
The focus of this wiki
Since anyone can register, what is the focus of this wiki? What
topics are allowed? If people with the For Future Alliance15, Extinction
Rebellion16, or Sunrise
Movement17 came to this
wiki, would you allow them to create pages for their needs too? I think
they would gain a great amount of cooperative mutual aid from something
more archival and concentrated than scattered pads, e-mail threads,
chatrooms, and video meetings that are ephemeral and hard or impossible
to search. --Cefra (talk) 20:16, 28 October 2021
(CEST)
-
I tried to reword the Main Page to make clear that every group you
listed is welcome. --Peter (talk) 13:37, 15 October 2022
(CEST)