We currently have just over 35 subscribers. I figure it is time for me to say something.
First of all, thanks for subscribing to the list.
This list started with a conversation that began at Wikimania. When Markus Glaser and I held a MediaWiki meetup one of the recurring themes was Wikifarms.
It seems that farms are relatively common. WikiApiary lists around 100 farms that have just two wikis all the way up to Wikki's 2000+. (WikiApiary is just starting out, so I'll forgive them that they miss Wikia's thousands.)
Despite the wide use of farms, there doesn't seem to be a "standard" way of setting one up. So I've created https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/52721 ("Create a Wikifarm profile for MediaWiki-Vagrant") that will help us capture the "best practices" way of setting up a wiki farm.
Of course, it would help to have some best practices first. My observation -- please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that there we seem to create MediaWiki ghettos. Developers and administrators in the Wikia ghetto don't communicate (much) with their counterparts in the Wikimedia ghetto or the Semantic MediaWiki ghetto.
So, best practices. MediaWiki-Vagrant and maybe the WikiFarm extension (does anyone use it?).
Maybe we can start the discussion by describing how we set up wikis on our farms?
Hey,
Unfortunately I'm not experienced at all with setting up wiki farms (hence I joined this mailing list to maybe learn a thing or two).
It is my understanding that when setting up wiki farms, there are a number of specific goals to be achieved:
- Centralized configuration of the individual wikis - Centralized authentication and authorization - Shared local files and resources - Shared wiki files (i.e., images with ForeignAPIRepo)
With these goals in mind, there are numerous different methods of achieving all of these goals. Centralized configuration is simple enough: just have a CommonSettings.php or something similar, or use puppet or something.
Centralized authentication can be done either by using a shared DB so that the user logins are all the same, by using OpenID or some other authentication delegation service, or by attempting to use Wikimedia's custom SSO service E:CentralAuth. For most wikis, the first is the easiest option and the second is the best option, although it'd be nice if E:OpenID was a little more stable.
I think a nice to-do list for making wikifarms easier to establish is:
- Evaluate current wikifarm extensions (e.g., E:WikiFarm), see what they do, and how they can be improved. - Get E:OpenID to a state where it can be easily and stably configured as an inter-wiki authentication service (if it's not at this state already)
Thoughts?
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@nichework.comwrote:
We currently have just over 35 subscribers. I figure it is time for me to say something.
First of all, thanks for subscribing to the list.
This list started with a conversation that began at Wikimania. When Markus Glaser and I held a MediaWiki meetup one of the recurring themes was Wikifarms.
It seems that farms are relatively common. WikiApiary lists around 100 farms that have just two wikis all the way up to Wikki's 2000+. (WikiApiary is just starting out, so I'll forgive them that they miss Wikia's thousands.)
Despite the wide use of farms, there doesn't seem to be a "standard" way of setting one up. So I've created https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/52721 ("Create a Wikifarm profile for MediaWiki-Vagrant") that will help us capture the "best practices" way of setting up a wiki farm.
Of course, it would help to have some best practices first. My observation -- please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that there we seem to create MediaWiki ghettos. Developers and administrators in the Wikia ghetto don't communicate (much) with their counterparts in the Wikimedia ghetto or the Semantic MediaWiki ghetto.
So, best practices. MediaWiki-Vagrant and maybe the WikiFarm extension (does anyone use it?).
Maybe we can start the discussion by describing how we set up wikis on our farms?
-- Mark A. Hershberger NicheWork LLC 717-271-1084
Wikifarm mailing list Wikifarm@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikifarm
I spent about 3 months setting up my wikae, and I was surprised by how few resources there were, despite how many folks actually set it up. During that time I was at capacity, so I was unable to edit the resources in the MediaWiki pages, but I hope this list can coordinate it so we can update the docs.
Here are a few things I would like to see:
* What everyone thinks a wiki farm is (like Tyler's list). I ran into conflicting configurations setting up mine, and having a planning doc would be helpful, similar to how the various features of a wiki are laid out for new folks. * I would like some of the larger wiki farm services to contribute their management scripts. If it is the case that no one has asked them, or they have other reasons besides keeping it secret, we could probably get a lot of great work from those folks. * I am fine having various levels of complexity for setting up a wikae family, as long as one of them is geared towards folks that have never run a wiki before. I guess this means making it easy to run MediaWiki as a multisite instance on par with WordPress (although with a little fuss we could make it like Drupal, which is not as easy as WP, but still better than our current state in MW).
I'll be watching the list closely. I will bump my server recipe to the top of my "write this or die" queue.
maiki
(This may come twice since I accidentally sent it to gmane initially.)
On 08/16/2013 11:48 AM, Tyler Romeo wrote:
It is my understanding that when setting up wiki farms, there are a number of specific goals to be achieved:
- Centralized configuration of the individual wikis
- Centralized authentication and authorization
- Shared local files and resources
- Shared wiki files (i.e., images with ForeignAPIRepo)
This is my understanding as well.
I think a nice to-do list for making wikifarms easier to establish is:
- Evaluate current wikifarm extensions (e.g., E:WikiFarm), see what they do, and how they can be improved.
- Get E:OpenID to a state where it can be easily and stably configured as an inter-wiki authentication service (if it's not at this state already)
Thoughts?
This is a great start. I've tried contacting the author of the WikiFarm extension to see if he can tell us how it can be used.
Tyler Romeo, 16/08/2013 17:48:
It is my understanding that when setting up wiki farms, there are a number of specific goals to be achieved:
- Centralized configuration of the individual wikis
- Centralized authentication and authorization
- Shared local files and resources
- Shared wiki files (i.e., images with ForeignAPIRepo)
I find this list useful, Tyler. Is there a wiki version of it? I think it would be useful to first of all define or list or brainstorm the issues this list is about. I'd like to add backup (private) and dump production + archiving (public) to the items, for instance, as someone who archived a few tens thousands wikis on archive.org. ;)
Nemo
On 09/01/2013 04:28 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Tyler Romeo, 16/08/2013 17:48:
It is my understanding that when setting up wiki farms, there are a number of specific goals to be achieved:
- Centralized configuration of the individual wikis
- Centralized authentication and authorization
- Shared local files and resources
- Shared wiki files (i.e., images with ForeignAPIRepo)
I find this list useful, Tyler. Is there a wiki version of it?
I liked it, too, and put it up at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:WikiFarm last week. Please feel free to update it with your ideas.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA384
Hi,
I'm one of the founders of Orain (https://orain.org), a new non-profit, ad-free wiki farm. I've administrated several wiki farms over the past few years. I've been publishing our configuration and tools on GitHub (https://github.com/orain), and I plan to improve what's already there in the near future. I'm about to leave on vacation for about 10 days, but after that, I plan to put together some documentation regarding the best practices in wiki farm administration. On 8/16/13 10:22 AM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
We currently have just over 35 subscribers. I figure it is time for me to say something.
First of all, thanks for subscribing to the list.
This list started with a conversation that began at Wikimania. When Markus Glaser and I held a MediaWiki meetup one of the recurring themes was Wikifarms.
It seems that farms are relatively common. WikiApiary lists around 100 farms that have just two wikis all the way up to Wikki's 2000+. (WikiApiary is just starting out, so I'll forgive them that they miss Wikia's thousands.)
Despite the wide use of farms, there doesn't seem to be a "standard" way of setting one up. So I've created https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/52721 ("Create a Wikifarm profile for MediaWiki-Vagrant") that will help us capture the "best practices" way of setting up a wiki farm.
Of course, it would help to have some best practices first. My observation -- please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that there we seem to create MediaWiki ghettos. Developers and administrators in the Wikia ghetto don't communicate (much) with their counterparts in the Wikimedia ghetto or the Semantic MediaWiki ghetto.
So, best practices. MediaWiki-Vagrant and maybe the WikiFarm extension (does anyone use it?).
Maybe we can start the discussion by describing how we set up wikis on our farms?
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Kudu kudu@riseup.net wrote:
I'm one of the founders of Orain (https://orain.org), a new non-profit, ad-free wiki farm. I've administrated several wiki farms over the past few years. I've been publishing our configuration and tools on GitHub (https://github.com/orain), and I plan to improve what's already there in the near future. I'm about to leave on vacation for about 10 days, but after that, I plan to put together some documentation regarding the best practices in wiki farm administration.
This is extraordinarily helpful. I'll try and look through the configuration when I have free time. Why fix something that's already been fixed?
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
My favorite part is that Orain has a proper TLS configuration that is actually secure, which is more than what Wikipedia can say.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 3:53 PM, Tyler Romeo tylerromeo@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Kudu kudu@riseup.net wrote:
I'm one of the founders of Orain (https://orain.org), a new non-profit, ad-free wiki farm. I've administrated several wiki farms over the past few years. I've been publishing our configuration and tools on GitHub (https://github.com/orain), and I plan to improve what's already there in the near future. I'm about to leave on vacation for about 10 days, but after that, I plan to put together some documentation regarding the best practices in wiki farm administration.
This is extraordinarily helpful. I'll try and look through the configuration when I have free time. Why fix something that's already been fixed?
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
Wow ! How do we install/configure this extension ? Seems very interesting !
Happy holidays ! J
From: wikifarm-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikifarm-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tyler Romeo Sent: Friday, August 16, 2013 3:53 PM To: Discussion for managers of Wiki Farms Subject: Re: [Wikifarm] Welcome to WikiFarm
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Kudu kudu@riseup.net wrote:
I'm one of the founders of Orain (https://orain.org), a new non-profit, ad-free wiki farm. I've administrated several wiki farms over the past few years. I've been publishing our configuration and tools on GitHub (https://github.com/orain), and I plan to improve what's already there in the near future. I'm about to leave on vacation for about 10 days, but after that, I plan to put together some documentation regarding the best practices in wiki farm administration.
This is extraordinarily helpful. I'll try and look through the configuration when I have free time. Why fix something that's already been fixed?
OK, so I did a quick look through the Orain framework, and the crux of the setup is basically a dynamically configured SiteConfiguration object combined with the custom Extension:CreateWiki. It's an interesting setup, and it's definitely a good base, but IMHO if we're going for the best solution then sysadmins shouldn't even have to go that far to set this up.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Pierre Labrecque pierre.labrecque@live.cawrote:
Wow ! How do we install/configure this extension ? Seems very interesting !
Happy holidays ! J****
*From:* wikifarm-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikifarm-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *Tyler Romeo *Sent:* Friday, August 16, 2013 3:53 PM *To:* Discussion for managers of Wiki Farms *Subject:* Re: [Wikifarm] Welcome to WikiFarm****
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Kudu kudu@riseup.net wrote:****
I'm one of the founders of Orain (https://orain.org), a new non-profit, ad-free wiki farm. I've administrated several wiki farms over the past few years. I've been publishing our configuration and tools on GitHub (https://github.com/orain), and I plan to improve what's already there in the near future. I'm about to leave on vacation for about 10 days, but after that, I plan to put together some documentation regarding the best practices in wiki farm administration.****
This is extraordinarily helpful. I'll try and look through the configuration when I have free time. Why fix something that's already been fixed?
*-- *****
*Tyler Romeo*****
Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016****
Major in Computer Science****
www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com ****
Wikifarm mailing list Wikifarm@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikifarm
On 08/16/2013 06:28 PM, Tyler Romeo wrote:
if we're going for the best solution then sysadmins shouldn't even have to go that far to set this up.
It isn't clear to me what the problem is with the setup you've described. Could you provide more detail for what you mean by "sysadmins shouldn't have to go that far"?
What would a sysadmin need to do to use this?
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@nichework.comwrote:
It isn't clear to me what the problem is with the setup you've described. Could you provide more detail for what you mean by "sysadmins shouldn't have to go that far"?
What would a sysadmin need to do to use this?
Basically, take a look at this file:
https://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbook/blob/master/roles/mediawiki/files/...
You shouldn't have to write a 619 line configuration file just to get your wiki farm up and running. Also, there's literally no documentation for how to use SiteConfiguration.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
On 08/16/2013 07:52 PM, Tyler Romeo wrote:
Basically, take a look at this file:
https://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbook/blob/master/roles/mediawiki/files/...
You shouldn't have to write a 619 line configuration file just to get your wiki farm up and running. Also, there's literally no documentation for how to use SiteConfiguration.
And here we return to the ever-present problem that MediaWiki has: all configuration is stored in files.
If the configuration didn't require writing PHP, then this would be a solved problem.
Mark.
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 8:06 PM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@nichework.comwrote:
And here we return to the ever-present problem that MediaWiki has: all configuration is stored in files.
If the configuration didn't require writing PHP, then this would be a solved problem.
Yeah good point, and I think fixing that problem is kind of out of the scope of the wikifarm problem. Maybe for now we should focus on documentation, and documenting the best method for getting a wikifarm running, and from there we can analyze our own docs and come up with ways to make things easier.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 8:07 AM, Tyler Romeo tylerromeo@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 8:06 PM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@nichework.comwrote:
And here we return to the ever-present problem that MediaWiki has: all configuration is stored in files.
If the configuration didn't require writing PHP, then this would be a solved problem.
Yeah good point, and I think fixing that problem is kind of out of the scope of the wikifarm problem. Maybe for now we should focus on documentation, and documenting the best method for getting a wikifarm running, and from there we can analyze our own docs and come up with ways to make things easier.
Actually, I have been experimenting around with how Wikimedia configures their code to actually set up a wiki farm. The Labs project StackFarm[1] (which is also going to be a new MediaWiki extension in the future to manage wiki farms) currently has a modified set up of the Wikimedia cluster configuration and is trimmed down to work with only one server. Perhaps on documentation I would be able to help out :)
[1]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nova_Resource:Stackfarm
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
Wikifarm mailing list Wikifarm@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikifarm
On 08/16/2013 03:38 PM, Kudu wrote:
I've been publishing our configuration and tools on GitHub (https://github.com/orain), and I plan to improve what's already there in the near future.
This is exactly what I am looking for.
Take note, folks. If you have look over this and see anything that your own code does better, post soon.
I've a feeling this stuff is going to make its way into MediaWiki-Vagrant. At least, that's what I'm going to work towards. CCing Ori, author of MediaWiki-Vagrant, now.