On 4/2/11 5:59 AM, Jodi Schneider wrote:
Yes--keeping the domain name is important. Otherwise, we break all links, and alienate existing users -- many of whom do not read these lists, and who may check the site infrequently. Since we're a nonprofit, we should ask about a discounted price.
OK, that makes sense. I am happy to make the inquiry later in the month, or someone else could do it sooner.
Further, we might want to change hosting again sometime in the future (for instance if Referata went away or significantly changed).
I see that "Referata offers hosting of semantic wikis" but I hadn't heard of it before, though WikiWorks is well-known. What's your connection with Referata, and how stable are they? It appears that hosting is funded by the fees, with the free hosting just coming along for the ride...
No connection. I suggest it for three reasons:
1. It's a concrete proposal for folks to respond to.
2. Yaron is apparently one of the principals of Semantic MediaWiki and thus invested in the MW/SMW community.
3. The only alternative I found in some brief searching was Wikia, which seemed less desirable because leaving Wikia seems to be hard (people report that they leave your wiki up even if you move somewhere else and ask for it to be turned off) and because they would put ads on it.
I'm happy to chip in on funding if needed.
No--the existing skin needs improvement. Is there info about the default Refarata skin?
I did not check. They do seem to have the Vector skin available (that's the new one that Wikipedia uses, right?).
It's great to have your offer of help for the transition. But one challenge is ongoing technical leadership. I'd like some clarification from Referata about what is included in hosting. Any volunteers for technical administration would be welcome, too!
Does this answer your questions?
http://referata.com/wiki/Referata:Features
I've proposed the "Ad-supported" ($50/mo list) and "Enterprise" ($80/mo) service levels. My take on ad-supported means that we could put our own ads on it if we want, but they don't put any of theirs, but that's something to clarify certainly.
I'm happy to be on top of technical issues and liaise with the vendor on getting stuff fixed, on a best effort basis (i.e., no guarantees of response time, no action if I'm on vacation, etc.). I have no interest in hacking LocalSettings.php, etc., but it looks like the vendor would take care of that.
I'm also happy to do the import/export tasks I proposed earlier.
Reid
Hi, a few quick things about AcaWiki, without replying to bits of individual emails:
Neeru Paharia started it with a small grant from the Hewlett Foundation. Neeru asked John Wilbanks and me to serve on AcaWiki's board (we've all worked together at Creative Commons), and Creative Commons to host and do a little development on the site initially. Hosting cool projects isn't generally something CC can do, but does use MW and SMW for its own site, so made an exception for the time being.
Jodi has also been really involved in the project, and Mako has been so far the only massive contributor. The project has probably been a success solely on the grounds of capturing and explaining some of the knowledge passing through Mako's brain. :-)
Neeru should speak up on disposition of the project, but IMO: * Folding into a WMF project would be by far the best outcome, whatever changes that would ential * Moving to another host is necessary in any case; Referata would probably be great, there was also discussion with Fabricatorz, run by Jon Phillips, another person we've worked with at CC * Making the UI as close to 100% stock MW/Vector as possible is desirable * Keeping SMW, much as I love it, is not crucial, at least to the current featureset
50 dollars in the month, what kind of hosting do you get? Somewhere shared or a dedicated machine?
2011/4/3 Mike Linksvayer ml@gondwanaland.com
Hi, a few quick things about AcaWiki, without replying to bits of individual emails:
Neeru Paharia started it with a small grant from the Hewlett Foundation. Neeru asked John Wilbanks and me to serve on AcaWiki's board (we've all worked together at Creative Commons), and Creative Commons to host and do a little development on the site initially. Hosting cool projects isn't generally something CC can do, but does use MW and SMW for its own site, so made an exception for the time being.
Jodi has also been really involved in the project, and Mako has been so far the only massive contributor. The project has probably been a success solely on the grounds of capturing and explaining some of the knowledge passing through Mako's brain. :-)
Neeru should speak up on disposition of the project, but IMO:
- Folding into a WMF project would be by far the best outcome, whatever
changes that would ential
- Moving to another host is necessary in any case; Referata would probably
be great, there was also discussion with Fabricatorz, run by Jon Phillips, another person we've worked with at CC
- Making the UI as close to 100% stock MW/Vector as possible is desirable
- Keeping SMW, much as I love it, is not crucial, at least to the current
featureset
-- Mike http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2009/10/06/acawiki/
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 4:18 PM, Mike Linksvayer ml@gondwanaland.com wrote:
Jodi has also been really involved in the project, and Mako has been so far the only massive contributor. The project has probably been a success solely on the grounds of capturing and explaining some of the knowledge passing through Mako's brain. :-)
Heh :)
Neeru should speak up on disposition of the project, but IMO:
- Folding into a WMF project would be by far the best outcome, whatever
< changes that would entail
As a reader more than a user to date, I'd like to see this happen as well, and would be interested in helping. The knowledge AcaWiki gathers is important, and deserves more visibility and long-term support.
SJ
2011/4/3 Mike Linksvayer ml@gondwanaland.com:
Neeru should speak up on disposition of the project, but IMO:
- Folding into a WMF project would be by far the best outcome, whatever
changes that would ential
Hm, AcaWiki without SMW? That seems like it would greatly diminish the value of the resource.
SMW is still a big heap of "untrusted code" from our perspective that we're not prepared to host on our main cluster yet, and our virtualized cluster for prototype sites is still pretty fragile. We're hoping to greatly expand it into a proper "labs" infrastructure through this calendar year, which would prepare us to host projects like AcaWiki with relative ease.
My recommendation would be to go with an SMW hosting provider for now, to help grow and nurture the wiki, and to consider a WMF migration towards end-of-2011. Mike, let me know if you want us to help with the hosting costs. IMO AcaWiki needs to get the tools that AcaWiki needs first and foremost, and shouldn't be constrained by WMF hosting parameters at this point in its development.
On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 14:21, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2011/4/3 Mike Linksvayer ml@gondwanaland.com:
Neeru should speak up on disposition of the project, but IMO:
- Folding into a WMF project would be by far the best outcome, whatever
changes that would ential
Hm, AcaWiki without SMW? That seems like it would greatly diminish the value of the resource.
SMW isn't crucial for any current site features; it's just an implementation alternative. Maybe that will change in the future, but I think a large community of contributors is vastly more important to a good future than any technical increment. At present however, I think the community is too small to even do the work of migrating away from SMW though. :-\
SMW is still a big heap of "untrusted code" from our perspective that we're not prepared to host on our main cluster yet, and our virtualized cluster for prototype sites is still pretty fragile. We're hoping to greatly expand it into a proper "labs" infrastructure through this calendar year, which would prepare us to host projects like AcaWiki with relative ease.
That's extremely exciting to hear, irrespective of eventual utility to AcaWiki. Wow! (Yes, I see "hoping", not reading certainty into above.)
My recommendation would be to go with an SMW hosting provider for now, to help grow and nurture the wiki, and to consider a WMF migration towards end-of-2011. Mike, let me know if you want us to help with the hosting costs. IMO AcaWiki needs to get the tools that AcaWiki needs first and foremost, and shouldn't be constrained by WMF hosting parameters at this point in its development.
Sounds good. I'll make sure CC facilitates such a move, and bug AcaWiki people until it happens. :-)
Mike
On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2011/4/3 Mike Linksvayer ml@gondwanaland.com:
Neeru should speak up on disposition of the project, but IMO:
- Folding into a WMF project would be by far the best outcome, whatever
changes that would ential
Hm, AcaWiki without SMW? That seems like it would greatly diminish the value of the resource.
SMW is still a big heap of "untrusted code" from our perspective that we're not prepared to host on our main cluster yet, and our virtualized cluster for prototype sites is still pretty fragile. We're hoping to greatly expand it into a proper "labs" infrastructure through this calendar year, which would prepare us to host projects like AcaWiki with relative ease.
Who is in charge the virtualized cluster work? We can be guinea pigs ;)
My recommendation would be to go with an SMW hosting provider for now, to help grow and nurture the wiki, and to consider a WMF migration towards end-of-2011. Mike, let me know if you want us to help with the hosting costs. IMO AcaWiki needs to get the tools that AcaWiki needs first and foremost, and shouldn't be constrained by WMF hosting parameters at this point in its development.
Cool, how would helping with the hosting costs work? It would be great to just avoid it and move right into virtualization :) great!
Cheers
Jon
-- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi folks,
I've been on vacation for the past couple of weeks, so here is a catch-all response to the apparent list activity while I've been gone. I have *not* edited the CC list - sorry for any duplicates.
* I agree that a medium- to long-term goal of being folded into WMF is an excellent one, and that the short-term strategy of transitioning from Creative Commons hosting to a dedicated MediaWiki provider is the best path to that goal.
* I do think that Semantic MediaWiki rather than plain MediaWiki is very important because of the type of use researchers are interested in; e.g., we need to be able to do searches like "author = X" and get citations where the author is X rather than all citations containing X anywhere in the summary. My understanding is that SMW can do this but MW cannot. Thus, IMO, waiting longer for WMF migration in order to continue to use SMW is the better choice.
* I am not very interested in being early-stage tester for an immature hosting structure - having reliable hosting is much more important to me (and, I claim, most researchers) than speeding development of WMF labs infrastructure, particularly if WMF already has a development plan that they're happy with. However, if WMF really needs the testing, I am happy to have that discussion.
* Regarding Referata vs. Fabricatorz, my take is that Referata would be preferable because they are a dedicated SMW host while Fabricatorz appears not to be. Referata would be shared hosting, but IMO that's fine.
Given all that, I propose to do the following. And by propose, I mean "I will start doing this unless people complain". :)
1. Open a free account at Referata, which gets us acawiki.referata.com. 2. Work with AcaWiki people to get an importable dump, containing existing AcaWiki accounts, taking appropriate steps to ensure privacy of account holders. 3. Import that into acawiki.referata.com 4. Have the community prod/test the new site; iterate until we have consensus that moving to Referata is right and the migration went OK. 5. Work with AcaWiki people to redirect the acawiki.org domain name, figure out the financials, and make the final cut-over.
No data would be lost in the transition - people will still be able to log in using existing accounts, and all history will be preserved. The only change people not paying attention to this discussion would notice is some period of read-only and a change in skin.
So the basic steps are: (a) change hosts, (b) become even more awesome, and (c) get "bought out" by WMF.
Please reply if anything above seems like a bad idea, if I've missed anything, or if you have any other thoughts. I'll start doing stuff within a few days unless there are objections or people want to discuss further.
Reid
Hi Reid, thanks for the detailed discussion. Our best course of action is to transition to the virtualized setup at wikimedia foundation to minimize steps.
There is no reason to transition twice if we can move to WMF infrastructure soon. There is no burning fire on CC hosting.
However, I need to talk more with our wikimedia foundation brethren about this.
Lets get more information before making more decisions on this one.
Please don't create any infrastructure right now. Our ideal solution is to of course keep SMW and move directly to WMF virtualization container and work through that with them. We already moved our bug tracking to wikimedia bugzilla, so that is all on track.
I have to go to San Francisco next week so Danese, Brion and Erik, can I get a slot in relevant schedules to move this forward faster :) Ping me offlist for those detalis.
Thanks Reid for keeping on this! All, I am moving our next few month fabricatorz/acawiki plan to the bug tracker today/tomorrow. Apologies for too many emails ;) (which is a good thing, really)
Jon
On 4/26/11 4:06 PM, Jon Phillips wrote:
Hi Reid, thanks for the detailed discussion. Our best course of action is to transition to the virtualized setup at wikimedia foundation to minimize steps.
There is no reason to transition twice if we can move to WMF infrastructure soon. There is no burning fire on CC hosting.
Hi Jon,
Thanks for the reply! An implicit purpose for my proposal was to light a fire under people, and that seems to have been successful.
I see two problems with the current setup which feel urgent to me.
First, the current AcaWiki skin is not so good. For the reasons I've mentioned earlier, I believe this negatively impacts our ability to grow the community.
Second, I am concerned about the reliability of the current hosting. For one, people have had difficulty getting problems resolved recently. This concern is shared with others - I know at least one person who is making regular dumps of AcaWiki because he does not have confidence in the backup plan (or, there isn't one).
Moving from CC to an intermediate provider would solve both these problems. However, I agree that one move is better than two - I'm happy to discuss other solutions as well.
The reason I feel urgency is this: I'm itching to start work on the annotated bibliography of wiki research we've been discussing on wiki-research-l (which would quadruple the number of summaries in AcaWiki), and I'm uncomfortable doing so with these two problems unsolved (or, at least, without a concrete plan for solving them and a credible, short timeline).
One scenario I would like to avoid is the move to WMF being "real soon now" for a long time, as that's a common issue with such moves. But, we could be on Referata within a few weeks easily.
Reid
On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Reid Priedhorsky reid@reidster.net wrote:
On 4/26/11 4:06 PM, Jon Phillips wrote:
Hi Reid, thanks for the detailed discussion. Our best course of action is to transition to the virtualized setup at wikimedia foundation to minimize steps.
There is no reason to transition twice if we can move to WMF infrastructure soon. There is no burning fire on CC hosting.
Hi Jon,
Thanks for the reply! An implicit purpose for my proposal was to light a fire under people, and that seems to have been successful.
Excellent!
I see two problems with the current setup which feel urgent to me.
First, the current AcaWiki skin is not so good. For the reasons I've mentioned earlier, I believe this negatively impacts our ability to grow the community.
Great, Fabricatorz is making a new theme. We will try to be as transparent as possible about this...ideas and thoughts on this super valuable!
Second, I am concerned about the reliability of the current hosting. For one, people have had difficulty getting problems resolved recently. This concern is shared with others - I know at least one person who is making regular dumps of AcaWiki because he does not have confidence in the backup plan (or, there isn't one).
Moving from CC to an intermediate provider would solve both these problems. However, I agree that one move is better than two - I'm happy to discuss other solutions as well.
Ok, so the problem sounds more like a development problem. I have extreme confidence in the CC sysadmin who is working on this who is a good friend of mine, and in close contact about issues.
On th dev front, Fabricatorz are taking a lead on resolving issues. It appears all issues have been resolved from the CC issue tracker.
So, please file bugs on the new wikimedia bug tracker if you see problems and we will work to resolve them together.
The reason I feel urgency is this: I'm itching to start work on the annotated bibliography of wiki research we've been discussing on wiki-research-l (which would quadruple the number of summaries in AcaWiki), and I'm uncomfortable doing so with these two problems unsolved (or, at least, without a concrete plan for solving them and a credible, short timeline).
I understand. I'm on this. Don't you worry :)
Best thing next imo is to file a bug about this and spec out your plan and what it will take. Sounds like some development needed. Ideal if you can do everything with the current setup and not need ssh access.
One scenario I would like to avoid is the move to WMF being "real soon now" for a long time, as that's a common issue with such moves. But, we could be on Referata within a few weeks easily.
This is high priority task. But, it should not block your development, planning and so forth. If you let us all know what you want, we can plan better.
Cheers
Jon
On 4/26/11 4:45 PM, Jon Phillips wrote:
First, the current AcaWiki skin is not so good. For the reasons I've mentioned earlier, I believe this negatively impacts our ability to grow the community.
Great, Fabricatorz is making a new theme. We will try to be as transparent as possible about this...ideas and thoughts on this super valuable!
My take, based on prior discussion, is that the consensus is that we just want to use the Vector theme and don't want to mess with designing a custom theme and keeping it up to date.
The reason I feel urgency is this: I'm itching to start work on the annotated bibliography of wiki research we've been discussing on wiki-research-l (which would quadruple the number of summaries in AcaWiki), and I'm uncomfortable doing so with these two problems unsolved (or, at least, without a concrete plan for solving them and a credible, short timeline).
I understand. I'm on this. Don't you worry :)
Best thing next imo is to file a bug about this and spec out your plan and what it will take. Sounds like some development needed. Ideal if you can do everything with the current setup and not need ssh access.
See prior e-mails for my proposal. I'm happy to do the needed dev work, and no it wouldn't need ssh access.
Reid
On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 5:00 PM, Reid Priedhorsky reid@reidster.net wrote:
On 4/26/11 4:45 PM, Jon Phillips wrote:
First, the current AcaWiki skin is not so good. For the reasons I've mentioned earlier, I believe this negatively impacts our ability to grow the community.
Great, Fabricatorz is making a new theme. We will try to be as transparent as possible about this...ideas and thoughts on this super valuable!
My take, based on prior discussion, is that the consensus is that we just want to use the Vector theme and don't want to mess with designing a custom theme and keeping it up to date.
I concur. We may want a custom *logo* but Vector is well-supported by usability testing and familiar from use in WMF wikis. Diverging themes have not served us well in the past.
Thoughts? -Jodi
PS-Let's take the theme/hosting conversation to AcaWiki-general -- it seems overly specific for wiki-research-l!
On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 11:05 AM, Jodi Schneider jschneider@pobox.com wrote:
On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 5:00 PM, Reid Priedhorsky reid@reidster.net wrote:
On 4/26/11 4:45 PM, Jon Phillips wrote:
First, the current AcaWiki skin is not so good. For the reasons I've mentioned earlier, I believe this negatively impacts our ability to grow the community.
Great, Fabricatorz is making a new theme. We will try to be as transparent as possible about this...ideas and thoughts on this super valuable!
My take, based on prior discussion, is that the consensus is that we just want to use the Vector theme and don't want to mess with designing a custom theme and keeping it up to date.
I concur. We may want a custom *logo* but Vector is well-supported by usability testing and familiar from use in WMF wikis. Diverging themes have not served us well in the past.
I agree, I think this is a good idea. Vector theme is well tested, we have logos. Let me followup on those items.
This is all good points on saving resources.
Jon
Thoughts? -Jodi
PS-Let's take the theme/hosting conversation to AcaWiki-general -- it seems overly specific for wiki-research-l!
I agree.
Jon
Hi Jon,
we're not ready to do this right now -- I suggest either staying with CC hosting or transitioning to Referata until we are (if you still want to move at that point). I'm happy to restart these conversations mid-August as we begin to get more serious about our labs effort. I targeted end of 2011 for a migration for a reason -- I do think Acawiki needs stable/performant hosting, and it needs to develop a real community, before we can move it over, and we need to have our ducks in a row to ensure a smooth transition.
Thanks, Erik
Thanks Erik. Let me talk with Reid and cc and then will reply. Cheers.
jon@fabricatorz.com http://fabricatorz.com On Apr 28, 2011 6:34 PM, "Erik Moeller" erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Jon,
we're not ready to do this right now -- I suggest either staying with CC hosting or transitioning to Referata until we are (if you still want to move at that point). I'm happy to restart these conversations mid-August as we begin to get more serious about our labs effort. I targeted end of 2011 for a migration for a reason -- I do think Acawiki needs stable/performant hosting, and it needs to develop a real community, before we can move it over, and we need to have our ducks in a row to ensure a smooth transition.
Thanks, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
On 4/28/11 7:33 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
Hi Jon,
we're not ready to do this right now -- I suggest either staying with CC hosting or transitioning to Referata until we are (if you still want to move at that point). I'm happy to restart these conversations mid-August as we begin to get more serious about our labs effort. I targeted end of 2011 for a migration for a reason -- I do think Acawiki needs stable/performant hosting, and it needs to develop a real community, before we can move it over, and we need to have our ducks in a row to ensure a smooth transition.
Given that, I reinstate my plan to being the Referata process.
As an example of my worries with the current hosting situation, here are a couple of new observations from the past few days:
1. The clock on AcaWiki is wrong by around 5 minutes.
2. There is a Bugzilla bug saying that AcaWiki is running a version of SMW with known security vulnerabilities (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28661). It is a week old and has generated no interest from people who can fix it (or even anyone in the AW community, for that matter).
These are basic issues, and rather than chasing basic issues like these at CC, I would prefer to move somewhere else forthwith and worry about higher-level things.
I did receive a private e-mail from Angela Beesley at Wikia encouraging us to host there (which I replied to). I still feel this is unworkable due to Wikia's poor track record of letting wikis go elsewhere (we need to be free to change arbitrarily, since the WMF plan may not work out for whatever reason and circumstances may change arbitrarily). Also, I feel we have sufficient donation power to avoid ads on the pages. However, I'm happy to have this conversation.
Reid
p.s. I see the CC list is growing and growing - I have no idea whether any of these people are subscribed to the lists, and so I don't feel that I can trim it. I do apologize for duplicate and/or unwanted e-mail, and I'll respect any requests to be removed from the CC list.
On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Reid Priedhorsky reid@reidster.net wrote:
On 4/28/11 7:33 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
Hi Jon,
we're not ready to do this right now -- I suggest either staying with CC hosting or transitioning to Referata until we are (if you still want to move at that point). I'm happy to restart these conversations mid-August as we begin to get more serious about our labs effort. I targeted end of 2011 for a migration for a reason -- I do think Acawiki needs stable/performant hosting, and it needs to develop a real community, before we can move it over, and we need to have our ducks in a row to ensure a smooth transition.
Given that, I reinstate my plan to being the Referata process.
As an example of my worries with the current hosting situation, here are a couple of new observations from the past few days:
- The clock on AcaWiki is wrong by around 5 minutes.
This is fixed now by CC sysadmin. NTP is tested and made sure to run. Please file if you see anything like this again.
- There is a Bugzilla bug saying that AcaWiki is running a version of
SMW with known security vulnerabilities (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28661). It is a week old and has generated no interest from people who can fix it (or even anyone in the AW community, for that matter).
Nathan from CC also upgraded SMW on that machine from 1.5 to 1.5.6, which is the latest stable version.
Fixed.
These are basic issues, and rather than chasing basic issues like these at CC, I would prefer to move somewhere else forthwith and worry about higher-level things.
Sure, well, they have to be resolved somewhere.
I did receive a private e-mail from Angela Beesley at Wikia encouraging us to host there (which I replied to). I still feel this is unworkable due to Wikia's poor track record of letting wikis go elsewhere (we need to be free to change arbitrarily, since the WMF plan may not work out for whatever reason and circumstances may change arbitrarily). Also, I feel we have sufficient donation power to avoid ads on the pages. However, I'm happy to have this conversation.
Reid
p.s. I see the CC list is growing and growing - I have no idea whether any of these people are subscribed to the lists, and so I don't feel that I can trim it. I do apologize for duplicate and/or unwanted e-mail, and I'll respect any requests to be removed from the CC list.
Great, lets move to acawiki and drop people who are far too busy to be annoyed with us ;)
Great Reid. Lets keep hosting at CC. I talked with the admins there, and they resolved these issues. We have a great relationship with CC, and there is no reason to change hosting at present as long as things are getting done. Still best course is to keep site stable for development, and work with WMF to transition there when possible and so we just keep focusing on growing usage and development.
Do you have access enough on acawiki to add the features you want and/or please file for what you need? We need to start tracking plans for new features on acawiki itself, but this is an issue for acawiki list. Ok, lets move discussion to acawiki to figure out best way to track new features.
Jon
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