On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 12:28 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Now that 1.19 deploy has been completed, it seems a good idea to discuss about our test wikis. I see the following problems:
- No inventory of test wikis exist. There are many and they don't follow any
pattern or rule of sort (see appendix).
- It's unclear what purpose those wikis have, in particular: if they're
permanent, or going to be deleted; if used only by developers or also open to generic testing by users or even as sandboxes/playgrounds ("let's see how sysop tools are"); when and how it's possible to request one (example real use case: "test the translation of FlaggedRevs to Finnish before deploy on fi.wiki").
- As a result, valuable content and activities are either misplaced and not
performed effectively (or at all), or lost forever in the end.
An example of the latter, which seems the worst problem: https://www.mediawiki.org/?oldid=499749#Feature_requests references a feedback page that got deleted in the meanwhile. The future of http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Problem_reports is unclear and the page overlaps with other wikis' purposes, in particular it should be on a permanent wiki and moved to mediawiki.org if only meant for developers/technical users or to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Problem_reports if it has the Wikimedia projects' users as audience.
I think that we should work on some sort of general policy for test wikis (very simple) to divide them in categories, avoid fragmentation and ensure we empower people to do all they need. The permanent test wikis at least should be easily discoverable from a central place (I've heard of a Wikimedia Labs automatical home page with index, but we need to focus on what's most urgent). In the meanwhile, it doesn't harm if each of us adds the (current or past) test wikis they remembers to this section I created: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_wikis#Test_wikis
Nemo
== Appendix == Examples of wikis follow (far from comprehensive):
- Main ones are https://test.wikipedia.org , https://test2.wikipedia.org
These wikis are in the production cluster. They are meant as a final test before code is fully launched in production. These wikis are as close to production as possible. test.wikipedia.org runs from NFS and is pre-deployment. test2.wikipedia.org is deployed in a similar way to the rest of the cluster.
- Now we have http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/ and all the related
wikis in the form http://af.wiktionary.beta.wmflabs.org but they're not accessible from anywhere, nor explained clearly, nor have an index or any navigation tool. ** Used to be deployment.wmflabs.org
Well, no. It used to be labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org and is now deployment.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org. Labs was a confusing name. Labs is the infrastructure supporting beta. Beta is meant to be a clone of production that hosts wikis in a similar manner. It's meant to be an environment close to production that can be used pre-production (meaning before it hits test or test2).
** The situation will get worse with subdomains not following any clear rule like http://education.wmflabs.org
So, we're looking at models for handling stuff like this...
Education is a project that isn't ready for production. It's in initial development. It needs to be demo'd publicly though. Because of that, we give it a public IP address and a domain name.
Just because it's in labs doesn't mean it's about to go into production. Labs is meant to prototype a *lot* of experimental things. When extensions get closer to being production ready, the current concept is that it'll move into beta to test functionality in a more production like environment.
- Several Labs wikis have been important for a while, now locked for unclear
reasons and with an even more unclear future. ** http://de.labs.wikimedia.org/ ** http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/ ** http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/ ** http://liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org/ (deleted)
- A bunch of prototype wikis exist or has existed at some point.
** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/release-en/Main_Page ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/deployment-en and so on ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org and so on ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/flaggedrevs ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/flaggedrevs-en and so on ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/flaggedrevsde/Hauptseite ** http://commons.prototype.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/sandbox.6/Main_Page ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/sandbox.3/Main_Page and so on ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/timedmedia/Main_Page ** http://commons.prototype.wikimedia.org/uwd ** http://prototype.wikimedia.org/wmde-sandbox-1/
All of these are going away. <something>.labs.wikimedia.org have already been closed. I'd *love* to delete them permanently, but we have no reasonable means of doing so in the production cluster.
All of the prototypes are going to go away soon. Beta is the replacement for prototype.
- Ryan