Thank you for raising the discussion!
On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 1:41 PM, This, that and the other < at.light@live.com.au> wrote:
I also think many of the communities, especially if small, would view a
brief period of downtime as an acceptable tradeoff
for having their domain name corrected. Especially "be-x-old", I've
always thought that one was pretty ugly, and wouldn't
be surprised if the Taraškievica Belarusian Wikipedia community felt the
same way.
On behalf of the be-x-old community, I can ensure that such a rename is really demanded and would find a great support, even if this causes hours or days of downtime. If a formal community discussion on this topic is required, it can definitely be arranged.
By the way, back in 2007, be-x-old was already renamed once, from be to be-x-old. As far as I remember, this caused periods of downtime and read-only, however eventually all the links, interwikis and templates were corrected manually or semi-automatically, so this added some work but was not a big problem back then.
Cheers, zedlik
On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 1:41 PM, This, that and the other < at.light@live.com.au> wrote:
Thanks for bringing this up, Amir.
I would point out that since there are such a lot of wikis waiting to be renamed, there is an opportunity for economy of scale here. If all the departments/people you list were able to set aside a couple of days to sit down together and rename the 15+ wikis waiting to be renamed, having figured out a process and renamed a trial wiki beforehand, I think it could be made worthwhile.
I also think many of the communities, especially if small, would view a brief period of downtime as an acceptable tradeoff for having their domain name corrected. Especially "be-x-old", I've always thought that one was pretty ugly, and wouldn't be surprised if the Taraškievica Belarusian Wikipedia community felt the same way.
I agree that getting community engagement/community liaisons involved and talking with relevant developers/ops folks and the affected editing communities would be a good next step.
TTO
(Sorry for not replying inline: my news client is pretty dumb, as you can probably guess from the header line below.)
-- "Jaime Crespo" wrote in message news:CABaSSrL0hm1T9sHd-qh1npK8J-OPUPttBr6_ muDAN3C5bWu25Q@mail.gmail.com...
(this is not an official response, just my opinion after some research on the topic)
Due to internal (and growing) complexity of the mediawiki software, and WMF installation (regarding numerous plugins and services/servers), this is a non trivial task. It also involves many moving pieces and many people- network admins (dns), general operations (load control/downtime), dbas (import/export), services, deployment engineers and developers (mediawiki configuration changes, patches).
What's worse, is that it would almost certainly create downtime for the wikis involved (not being able to edit) -specially given that it is not a common operation-, and some of them are smaller communities, and I would be worried be to annoy or discourage editing on those wikis (when we want the opposite!).
It would be great to have someone in contact with the community so that we can identify which sites have a great consensus about renaming the wiki, and are perfectly informed about the potential problems and still are ok to go forward. Maybe someone in Community engagement can evaluate risks vs. return?
On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 9:53 AM, Antoine Musso hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
Le 26/08/2015 07:20, Amir E. Aharoni a écrit :
In the past when requests to rename such domains were raised, the usual replies were along the lines of "it's impossible" or "it's not worth the technical effort", but I don't know the details.
Is this still correct in 2015?
As pointed out: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T21986
For what it is worth, in 2011 JeLuF wrote a list of actions needed to rename a wiki. It is outdated nowadays but that is sufficient to state renaming a wiki is a non-trivial task: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rename_a_wiki
It would surely consume a lot of engineering time to come up with a proper migration plan and actually conduct them. I am not sure it is worth the time and money unfortunately.
-- Antoine "hashar" Musso
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-- Jaime Crespo http://wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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