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Hi,
I'm Kudu, the co-founder of Orain (https://orain.org), a new non-profit wiki farm. Although it's pretty new and constantly changing, I think it's pretty similar to what many of you might have had in mind: community-led, free, ad-free and technologically advanced (MW 1.22wmf22, CDN, SSL/TLS, and more to come).
We're also taking an open approach by developing our software openly as free software, including our server configuration (Ansible playbook): https://github.com/Orain Please note that our code is a work in progress.
I think our organization would be a good fit to potentially be officially supported by MediaWiki, since, as a non-profit, we invest all our donations into our servers.
We currently cater to two types of wikis: public wikis (open, CC-licensed) and certain private wikis. The only type of private wikis we're currently accepting are those that in some way benefit society or the advancement of education, e.g. a wiki request we got recently for a philosophy collaboration project between teachers. They could also be non-profits, libraries, etc.
In the future, we will consider expanding to the wikis that don't fit into those categories, such as personal wikis, company wikis, etc. Those may be ad-supported or paid for a small fee. Those could also include custom SSO integration, etc.
Feel free to drop by our IRC channel (#orain on freenode) or reply to this message if you have any questions or feedback. :)
Regards, - -Kudu. On 10/14/13 10:41 PM, Quim Gil wrote:
On 10/02/2013 06:33 PM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
Did you see the Orain wikifarm? https://meta.orain.org/
No, I hadn't. But I followed your advice, I checked it out, tested the service with a wiki that some friends wanted to create and got to know the main contributors. Thank you! It's a very interesting community project run by wikipedians that love MediaWiki.
In fact I find it has some relation to this discussion and the possibilities suggested by Brion, Ori, Ryan, Mark... You are talking about an affordable Turbo service for power users and they are providing a free Diesel service for anybody.
But no just any diesel, check
https://meta.orain.org/wiki/Special:Version MediaWiki 1.22wmf16, MariaDB, Scribunto and more if you ask for it.
and see also their projects to maintain their farm at https://github.com/Orain https://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbook/blob/master/roles/mediawiki/tasks/...
These people are clearly aligned with what this community is developing. They also seem to be having a similar vision about maintaining instances pulling from repositories, etc. If some of you think they could improve their approach I'm sure they would be happy to listen and discuss.
Now I imagine the combination of this free-for-all service with the affordable DIY setup you were describing and I see a great service for the community, yes.
Post Disclaimer: today I donated to Orain.org to support the initiative. An hour later they convinced me to move my pet project there. I wasn't amused about having to update core and extensions when MW 1.22 was out. Now my site is running basically the latest you can find out of the Wikimedia servers. And I will concentrate on my users and content. Happy.