[Wikimedia-l] Public Google Calendar for IRC office hours

[MZMcBride]

Michael Peel wrote:
> I'm seriously having a hard time believing this. It's a trivial calendar.
> There are so many open solutions available. See, for example, just looking at
> mediawiki-integrated calendar solutions:
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Calendar
> 
> I constructed a calendar system, relying just on PHP functions, a decade ago
> (albeit integrated with phpbb rather than mediawiki). It's not a big problem
> to solve in an open source manner.
> 
> There is, simply, *no* excuse for using a closed source piece of software to
> do this for Wikimedia purposes.
> 
> The mind boggles at this situation...

Yes, you're right. But perfect is the enemy of the done here. In certain
cases, using a technology is an absolute no-go (for example, leaking visitor
information via iframes). In this case, I don't think we're dealing with
anything of that nature (though please clarify if I'm missing something).

You should file a bug in Bugzilla about fixing this system up in the future:
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/>. It's definitely not ideal, but it's good
enough for now, I think.

In addition to the proprietary/free issue, duplicating content is awful from
a maintenance perspective. As far as I know, there's no automatic sync in
place, so the wiki and Google are inevitably going to fall out of sync.
There are other reasons to keep the information centralized, but until the
wiki can support XML and iCal output, the benefit of using Google outweighs
the cost.

MZMcBride