Mediawiki-enterprise August 2013

mediawiki-enterprise@lists.wikimedia.org

11 participants
6 discussions

Gathering money for MediaWiki ACL (was: How do you manage the security in your Mediawiki installation (Enterprise wiki) ?)
by Yury Katkov 16 Oct '13

16 Oct '13

Hi Mark! I propose to split the topic and discuss the creation of ACL for MW in this thread. I see three sub-tasks here: 0) Writing a good proposal of how ACL should work. Will it be based on namespaces? or maybe categories (although it's hard to imagine)? or maybe per-page access? I can help to describe this vision document. 1) coordination with WMF and including ACL into Roadmap. First we need to be sure that the possible patches to the core: - will not be rejected just because of philosofy of openness - will not be removed after several versions I've got no ideas how that can be done. Probably via RFC with signatures of interested companies. 2) Searching for the developers and tester. There are many possible developers that may be interested in this task: HalloWelt, Custis, DIQA-PM, maybe even Wikia. Besides there are a lot of independent developers here 3) Fundraising. For independent developer it's possible to ask for individual engagement grant [1] but mostly it should be a crowdfunding from MediaWiki-related companies. For that task we need a person who has personal contact with many MediaWiki-related companies and is ready to contact each of them asking to take part in funding. I'm not sure who that can be (maybe me, maybe someone from organizing comittee of Wikimania or Wikisym, maybe someone from WMF) but it's going to be a god damn lot of dirty work that needs funding. [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Individual_Engagement_Grants Cheers, ----- Yury Katkov, WikiVote On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 4:38 AM, Mark A. Hershberger <mah(a)nichework.com> wrote: > On 08/23/2013 06:31 PM, Yury Katkov wrote: >> Of course, after some time the extension will stop working because of >> ugly hacks that will definetely appear in the code. >> >> Another and more proper solution is not so fast, that is: to lobby the >> proper ACL support in MediaWiki core before starting development. > > +1 > > Markus Glaser and I have discussed precisely this as one of the biggest > hurdles for Corporate adoption of MediaWiki. There are a lot of things > to do in the MediaWiki space but, as you point out, this is one that we > need developers outside the WMF for. > >> MediaWiki is used as an enterprise wiki and the impossibility of good >> ACL should not be considered as not some kind of philosophy of the >> software (as some people claims) but as a bug that needs fixing. > > +1 (again. That makes 2 points for Yury, so far.) > > So if -- as many of us on the -enterprise mailing list agree, I think -- > this is a bug that needs fixing, how are we going to fix it? > > That is, where is the money to pay for developer time going to come from? > > The release manager contractor[1] that the WMF is funding this year is > meant to be finding funds outside of the Foundation to sustain release > management long term. One way to do that is to begin extending > MediaWiki in ways that enterprises would be willing to fund -- say, for > example. through developing ACLs. > > If we can find some MW developers interested in working on adding this > to core, and the money to fund those developer's work, the problem then > becomes coordinating their work and making sure it has real momentum. > > Thoughts? > > -- > Mark A. Hershberger > NicheWork LLC > 717-271-1084

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Fwd: Etherpad Lite labs instance going down in two weeks - backup time
by Sumana Harihareswara 05 Sep '13

05 Sep '13

Thanks to Mark Holmquist for maintaining http://etherpad.wmflabs.org for the past long while. It is going down in 2 weeks, so please retrieve your text. I recommend that you: * go into your browser history * search it for etherpad.wmflabs.org * go to each of those pads and copy-and-paste the content someplace, preferably on a public wiki, even if it's just in your userspace * replace the content of the Etherpad with a link to the wiki page you've moved the text to -Sumana -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Wikitech-l] Etherpad Lite labs instance going down in two weeks - backup time Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 13:02:13 -0700 From: Mark Holmquist <mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org> Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, engineering(a)lists.wikimedia.org, labs-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org The day we have all equally hoped for and dreaded is come to pass: Etherpad Lite has now replaced Etherpad "Classic" in production, and the labs instance is on its way out. This is my as-wide-as-possible email warning to say that everything on the labs instance, as really should have been expected, is going to be gone soon. Not immediately - we intend to give you two weeks to get your important data off the instance and onto the new one at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/ - but you should _absolutely_ be moving things as soon as possible. We will also keep a data dump around, in case anything else needs to get pulled out of the pads, but I would suggest not relying on that if you don't have to. And in the future: If a URL has "wmflabs.org" in it...don't put anything, ANYTHING, important there. The purpose of labs is to let us experiment with new technology without having to worry about reliability. Thanks so much for your help and understanding in the course of this migration. tl;dr: http://etherpad.wmflabs.org is going down in 2 weeks, get yer stuff off it. -- Mark Holmquist Software Engineer, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Fwd: New Search Backend Available
by Mark A. Hershberger 31 Aug '13

31 Aug '13

In case you aren't on the other two lists, this looks like something Enterprise users would be interested in. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: New Search Backend Available Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 11:24:27 -0400 From: Nikolas Everett <neverett(a)wikimedia.org> Reply-To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> To: mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org CC: Chad Horohoe <chorohoe(a)wikimedia.org> Newsgroups: gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki Chad Horohoe and I've been working on a new search backend for MediaWiki for the past few months and it is finally ready for people to try out! Project goals: 1. Parity or better than the MWSearch/lsearchd combination used inside WMF. 2. Easier install than the MWSearch/lsearchd combination used inside WMF. 3. Expand templates before indexing. 4. Horizontal scalability for query performance (read this as sharded indexes) It is currently running in WMF's beta environment (http://beta.wmflabs.org/) and on test2.wikipedia.org and as an option on mediawiki.org (you have to add the super secret url parameter "srbackend=CirrusSearch".) We think we've hit goals 2, 3, and 4 already. We're far enough along with goal 1 that any features missing are being filed as bug (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=230108&resolution=---&qu…) We'd love for some guinea pigs to give it a shot on wikis outside of WMF. To set it up you'd need to: 1. Install elasticsearch (http://elasticsearch.org/) 2. Setup Mediawiki from the master branch: git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/core <the rest of setup> 3. Clone CirrusSearch: cd mediawiki/extensions git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/CirrusSearch 4. Update the submodule in CirrusSearch: cd CirrusSearch git submodule init git submodule update) 5. Turn on CirrusSearch and configure it in LocalSettings.php by adding: require_once( "$IP/extensions/CirrusSearch/CirrusSearch.php" ); $wgCirrusSearchServers = array( 'the_server_on_which_you_installed_elasticsearch'); 6. Run two scripts to set up the index: php updateSearchConfig.php php forceSearchIndex.php At some point we'll update mediawiki-vagrant to handle all that automatically.... Please us me know what you think. Nik Everett _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

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How do you manage the security in your Mediawiki installation (Enterprise wiki) ?
by Pierre Labrecque 26 Aug '13

26 Aug '13

Hello, We continue to do our homeworks concerning a project we have to build a wiki for our enterprise: 80 000 employees, but only 1000 of them could have access to the wiki: usually in read, some people in read/write. We will need per namespace security: some namespaces should not be read by some groups We dont want to go with many tons of wikis installation I wrote a post on another mailing list about it a couple of days ago: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/mediawiki/381274 I had some very good and helpful comments, but its after that I found another mailing list (this one), which seems dedicated to the enterprise usage of Mediaiwki. Here are the requierement we have: Main page - NamespaceA (read for departmentA only) - NamespaceB (read for departmentB only) - . - NamespaceZ (read for departmentZ) Sometimes, someone of departmentA will need read access to NamespaceZ, etc I would like to have some testimonials: your experiences, your recommendations on a specific aspect of Mediawiki: ACL !!! (recurring topic, I believe). I read http://blog.blue-spice.org/2012/10/23/mediawiki-vs-confluence-not-a-question -of-features/ and found that they use Lockdown and some other extensions around it, to secure the wiki As everyone, I read http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_issues_with_authorization_extensions and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Page_specific_user_rights_extensions So, I wrote to BlueSpice team to know if they believe that Lockdown is really secure to write sensitive data in a Mediawiki wiki. Answer was honest: no (as expected). I wrote also to the guy who founded Intelpedia (Josh Bancroft) and he confirms that Mediawiki is the wrong tool to manage that kind of ACL and that they use other tools for sensitive data, not their wiki I didnt insist to know which other tool I was impressed that a guy at this level take the time to answer me, so J Anyway, could you tell me what is the kind of setup you have on this side (ACL) ? Certainly that some of you use in the facts an ACL extension (Lockdown or others) ? Do you trust them ? Do you have implement some other kind of security ? etc Wikifarm ? etc Sincerely, I believe I have read enough on the web about the subject now, I need some concrete experiences, from real persons, in real enterprises, Voilà. Thanks ! Pierre

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What groups and communities are good to advertise MediaWiki?
by Yury Katkov 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

Hi guys! I think that besides advertising your own company's service to increase revenue we have to promote MediaWiki, wikis, and wiki way in general to attract more potential clients. Because of that I decided to do some journalism from time to time and highlight successfull use cases that have been implemented with the help MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki. But who are those people that can be interested in using MediaWiki in their enterprises? Technical documentation specialists, knowledge managers, enterprise architechture folks? And where do they communicate? Let's brainstorm a little bit. Cheers, ----- Yury Katkov, WikiVote

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SMWCon Fall 2013: 2nd Call for Contributions. Registration.
by Yury Katkov 22 Aug '13

22 Aug '13

Dear semantic wiki users and developers, We are very happy to announce that early bird registration to the 8th Semantic MediaWiki Conference is now open [2]! Important facts reminder: ------------------------------ * Dates: October 28th to October 30th 2013 (Monday to Wednesday) * Location: A&O Berlin Hauptbahnhof, Lehrter Str. 12, 10557 Berlin, Germany * Conference wiki page: https://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2013 * Participants: Everybody interested in semantic wikis, especially in Semantic MediaWiki, e.g. users, developers, consultants, business representatives and researchers. We welcome new contributions from you: ------------------------------ * We encourage contributions about applications and development of semantic wikis; for a list of topics, see [1] * Please propose regular talks, posters or super-short lightning talks on the conference website. We will provide feedback to you and do our best to consider your proposal in the conference program * Tutorials and presentations will be video and audio recorded and made available for others after the conference. * If you've already announced your talk it's now time to expand its description News on participation, tutorials and keynote: ------------------------------ * You can now officially register for the conference [2] and benefit from early bird fees until September 14, 2013 * The tutorial program has been announced and available [3]. This year we have two tutorial tracks: ** The beginner's tutorials are focused on business applications of semantic wikis ** The developer's tutorials will help you to become Semantic MediaWiki programmer: contributing to core and and writing extensions for your specific needs * Professor Yolanda Gil from the University of Southern California [4] will give a keynote on scientific data curation Organizers and sponsors ------------------------------ * Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. [5] has become the official organiser of SMWCon Fall 2013 * Thanks to our sponsors WikiVote [6] (platinum) and ArchiXL [7] (gold) fees for this SMWCon remain low If you have questions you can contact Yury Katkov (Program Chair), Benedikt Kämpgen (General Chair) or Karsten Hoffmeyer (Local Chair) per e-mail (Cc). We will be happy to see you in Berlin! Yury Katkov, Program Chair [1] <http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon Fall 2013/Announcement> [2] <http://de.amiando.com/PVADAOV.html> [3] <http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2013#Program> [4] <http://www.isi.edu/~gil/> [5] <https://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Hauptseite> [6] <http://wikivote.ru/> [7] <http://www.archixl.nl/>

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Mediawiki-enterprise August 2013