Hi! On Wed, Feb 05, 2025 at 12:27:22AM +0100, Serafeim (Serafi) Zanikolas wrote: >On Tue Feb 4, 2025 at 1:12 AM CET, Steve McIntyre wrote:
... >> I've been struggling to find time to debug some problems I've found >> with migrating moin 1 wikis to moin 2, which is my own preference for >> the future. :-( As I've said to a few people over the last couple of >> years, I'm not going to step in the way of people who might want to >> work on migrating to a different wiki engine entirely. I'm happy to >> give people data dumps etc. for them to experiment. However, I'm short >> of time and motivation to get more involved than that. Particularly I >> have no desire to be responsible for running anything in PHP >> (*shudder*). > >I completely understand that, and I'm sorry that you have to toil away on your >own and on top of it have to put up with people complaining about the wiki, and >how the wiki engine grass is greener on the other side. > >full disclosure: I also dislike php and like git but I'm not wedded to any >platform. I'm thinking to make a call for contributors along the lines of: >"I'm willing to moderate and/or sysadmin if the engine is one of [..]" to gauge >which platform would mobilise more volunteers (using DD and to a lesser extent >DM member status as proxy for "this person is more likely to walk the talk"). ACK, cool. >> In terms of content, in the past both Paul and I have been involved in >> content moderation too. I guess there's a random page somewhere that >> lists him and not me. Meh. I've still been doing that as and when >> there have been disagreements, but (again, spot the pattern!) I don't >> have time to do anything proactive here. Help here would be >> awesome. Various people have offered help over the years and we've >> started discussions but in the longer term most have wandered off. > >do you have any advice to share with respect to content moderation and >organization (besides fighting spam), e.g. anything you'd have done differently >were you to start now? (https://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki/NextGen and >https://wiki.debian.org/MaythamAlsudany/DraftContentGuidelines have some >suggestions). how do you feel about dropping whole categories from the wiki? >e.g. all of CategoryNews FrontPageNews ProjectNews seem abandoned to me, and >kind of irrelevant given the many other ways the project uses to communicate >externally. I'd love to see some better structure, and people working to keeping existing pages updated rather than the (all-too-common on wikis!) problem of adding new pages and leaving older things to rot. Proactive moderation of namespace (etc.) would help here. We've spoken in the past about maybe adding automatic checks on the age of pages in some areas, prodding contributors to check if things are still relevant if pages haven't been updated in some time. Yes, we should absolutely try to clean up things that are documented better elsewhere. *However*, I've always been concerned that the effort involved in publishing on www.d.o and other locations can put people off. I'm personally happier to see (slightly) rougher content provided on the wiki than not have that content at all. In terms of providing new content that describes what we do, how to do things in Debian, etc.: a consistent policy of labelling release-specific information would be helpful, so we can track when things should be archived. I really *don't* like the idea of starting the wiki again from scratch - we have a lot of good information that will be lost doing that. I'm very happy that some teams are using the wiki to track their activities and maintain useful content there. Conversely, I'm concerned that we're starting to get fragmentation with some folks using wikis on salsa (for example) - the more places we have for content, the harder it is to find. :-( >> I got involved in wiki admin years back, mainly to help deal with the >> spam problem that we had at the time. Over time, spammers got worse >> and worse to the extent that it became my main focus. Not enough >> spammers on fire, etc. :-( > >are you referring to blocking scrapers, or spammers actually writing in the >wiki, or both? (I'd, naively perhaps, think that the latter would be a >non-issue >since self-service registration has been disabled) Both, really. I put a *lot* of effort in to keep the self-service registration working for as long as possible. Then the spammers won and we had to close things. The scrapers is a much more recent issue. Idiots causing huge load trying to download the entire wiki at speed. We've had to block an ever-increasing number of netblocks to stop this and to keep the wiki available for the rest of us. Morons making the world worse for everybody. :-( -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.
