Austin Hair wrote:
- We don't own wikimania.org.
Who does? The registrant's name doesn't ring a bell. Of course wikimania.wikimedia.org would work just as well.
- Having separate wikis for each conference avoids quite a lot of
unnecessary maintanance each year, such as archiving *every single page* and updating the user list.
I'm not sure if creating a whole new empty wiki each year is really simpler. There are quite a lot of pages that are needed on every Wikimania wiki. Those are mostly templates and translated (placeholder) pages (e.g. "The Call for participation is not open yet").
For wikimania2010.wikimedia.org a confusing method was chosen – it seems parts of the database of 2009's wiki were copied to the new database (to be more specific: revisions of selected pages into the archive table). Logs weren't copied, which makes the whole thing even more confusing (I learned about this when I stumbled across an inconsistent undeletion action of a page which never existed).
How about the following: After each Wikimania, the database is forked into a new static wiki (it may remain open a while in case there are any follow-ups on the preceding Wikimania). It is locked and represents a snapshot of the original wiki at the time of a specific Wikimania. The actual wiki remains up-to-date, that means after a static fork has been created, all pages that are not required for future events are deleted. This shouldn't be too much work.
Regards,
Church of emacs