On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 4:18 PM, Mike Linksvayer &lt;ml(a)gondwanaland.com&gt; wrote: Heh :) < 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

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 14:21, Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: 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. :-\ That's extremely exciting to hear, irrespective of eventual utility to AcaWiki. Wow! (Yes, I see "hoping", not reading certainty into above.) Sounds good. I'll make sure CC facilitates such a move, and bug AcaWiki people until it happens. :-) Mike

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 -- I work for IBM, and sending this e-mail might be part of my job. However, I speak for myself only, not the company.

On 4/26/11 4:06 PM, Jon Phillips wrote: 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 -- I work for IBM, and sending this e-mail might be part of my job. However, I speak for myself only, not the company.

On 4/26/11 4:45 PM, Jon Phillips wrote: 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. 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 -- I work for IBM, and sending this e-mail might be part of my job. However, I speak for myself only, not the company.

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 11:05 AM, Jodi Schneider &lt;jschneider(a)pobox.com&gt; wrote: 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 I agree. Jon -- Jon Phillips http://rejon.org/ | http://fabricatorz.com/ chat/skype: kidproto | irc: rejon +1.415.830.3884 (global) | +1-510-499-0894 (sf) +86-187-1003-9974 (beijing)

Thanks Erik. Let me talk with Reid and cc and then will reply. Cheers. jon(a)fabricatorz.com http://fabricatorz.com On Apr 28, 2011 6:34 PM, "Erik Moeller" &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Reid Priedhorsky &lt;reid(a)reidster.net&gt; wrote: This is fixed now by CC sysadmin. NTP is tested and made sure to run. Please file if you see anything like this again. Nathan from CC also upgraded SMW on that machine from 1.5 to 1.5.6, which is the latest stable version. Fixed. Sure, well, they have to be resolved somewhere. 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 -- Jon Phillips http://fabricatorz.com/ chat/skype: kidproto | irc: rejon +1.415.830.3884 (global) | +1-510-499-0894 (sf) +86-187-1003-9974 (beijing)