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Miraheze to shut down

meta.miraheze.org

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Re: Miraheze to shut down

#61

Post by eudaemon »

labster wrote: post #56

As the former CFO and a former SRE for Miraheze, I'm going to try to save the farm. I was uninvolved in the current problems, and at first was wondering what was going on so as to save my own wikis. The fundamentals at Miraheze are much better than they look; it's just that certain problems between volunteers got far out of hand, and with an all-volunteer force other people decided to leave to escape the drama. There…

Particularly at this point, I'd like to see better communication between the board and wiki members/crats/admins. No news has been the rule with Miraheze except for planned service outages and donation requests. The way I found out about the closure announcement was from a Tweet that rides in with a 503 error message. I know it's early days, but a message about proposing to continue Miraheze would be useful on that platform, yes?

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#62

Post by labster »

eudaemon wrote: post #61
labster wrote: post #56

As the former CFO and a former SRE for Miraheze, I'm going to try to save the farm. I was uninvolved in the current problems, and at first was wondering what was going on so as to save my own wikis. The fundamentals at Miraheze are much better than they look; it's just that certain problems between volunteers got far out of hand, and with an all-volunteer force other people decided to leave to escape the drama. There…

Particularly at this point, I'd like to see better communication between the board and wiki members/crats/admins. No news has been the rule with Miraheze except for planned service outages and donation requests. The way I found out about the closure announcement was from a Tweet that rides in with a 503 error message. I know it's early days, but a message about proposing to continue Miraheze would be useful on that p…

No communication is standard operating procedure right now. Volunteers found out this decision at the same time as everyone else, which meant no one had time to prepare.

We need to better communicate our plans and goals, and of course about downtime. But we also don’t want to flood average wiki users with sitenotices either. What kinds of communication would you like to see more of?

I will put out a sitenotice soon, but I need the outgoing board to buy-in first. Which I’m hoping will happen in the next few hours.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#64

Post by Tomte »

labster wrote: post #56

As the former CFO and a former SRE for Miraheze, I'm going to try to save the farm. I was uninvolved in the current problems, and at first was wondering what was going on so as to save my own wikis. The fundamentals at Miraheze are much better than they look; it's just that certain problems between volunteers got far out of hand, and with an all-volunteer force other people decided to leave to escape the drama. There…

Your "Upvotes appreciated. Please give me karma." in Discord is not okay by HN's rules, though.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#65

Post by labster »

Tomte wrote: post #64
labster wrote: post #56

As the former CFO and a former SRE for Miraheze, I'm going to try to save the farm. I was uninvolved in the current problems, and at first was wondering what was going on so as to save my own wikis. The fundamentals at Miraheze are much better than they look; it's just that certain problems between volunteers got far out of hand, and with an all-volunteer force other people decided to leave to escape the drama. There…

Your "Upvotes appreciated. Please give me karma." in Discord is not okay by HN's rules, though.

Yeah, it was a joke. That I backed off of right away. All I could think was that I'd like at least one voice who wasn't saying doom and gloom about everything near the top, so that we could possibly save things. Right now Miraheze is in an entirely unnecessary cascade caused by overreactions.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#66

Post by Nemo_bis »

tallies wrote: post #53
culi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wiki also got affected by the harddrive. They send out a message with everything they knew pretty much immediately even to people not affected by the error and continued to update as they learned more. Not sure why you seem to think it took "weeks". For a volunteer-run service they've actually been quite on top of it and compassionate in my experience

You're right, it was 10 days, not quite weeks. It's not important but here are some of the miscommunications and apologies: November 18: "The cloud server which hosts one of our database, db141, experienced a disk issue. As a result, a small number of wikis hosted on db141 are unavailable. [...] While cloud14 has been reinstalled, we will have to send the affected disks to professional data recovery. The earliest ETA…

My guess is that they used some of the XML dumps we of WikiTeam keep at https://archive.org/details/wikiteam , that not everyone at Miraheze was necessarily aware of.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#67

Post by Nemo_bis »

aerio wrote: post #45
LordShredda wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It clearly says technical burnout. Why do you have to blame GDPR? If anything it was the best thing to happen to the open internet

Yeah, speaking as a European tech lead; GDPR was a pain in the butt a few years ago when it was introduced - and all client websites had to be retroactively fitted with cookie systems, routines had to be implemented, stuff had to be learned, etc. Once sites are planned with it in mind from the get go it's really no big deal, and huge for the end user.

Cookies were regulated by the ePrivacy directive back in 2009. The case raised above is about someone who had access to see the users' IP address. Handling training and authorisations for people with access to personal data is an ongoing job, not something you do once and forget.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#68

Post by Nemo_bis »

labster wrote: post #56

As the former CFO and a former SRE for Miraheze, I'm going to try to save the farm. I was uninvolved in the current problems, and at first was wondering what was going on so as to save my own wikis. The fundamentals at Miraheze are much better than they look; it's just that certain problems between volunteers got far out of hand, and with an all-volunteer force other people decided to leave to escape the drama. There…

On "starting a new nonprofit": yes please, it's about time to have an entity with proper accountability.

Miraheze is mostly volunteer-run but it also needs a commercial side (such as selling premium features/support, and paying some people to handle them), so an obvious solution is a coop. I can help found a coop in Finland, where we have several long-standing MediaWiki devs, so that any EU person can easily participate. There might be other suitable EU jurisdictions but Finnish law is quite nice and easy: https://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/2001/en20011488.pdf

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#69

Post by Nemo_bis »

nologic01 wrote: post #41

I wish mediawiki was more loved. It is an amazingly effective and intuitive piece of software. But maintaining, upgrading and managing it and the various extensions is a pain. I suspect a rethink and rewrite could substantially reduce the cost of running such wili farms but is unlikely to ever happen.

Actually, MediaWiki 1.38 and MediaWiki 1.39 (released in November 2022) is already set to help run wiki farms more easily: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.38/New_configurat...

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#70

Post by labster »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #68
labster wrote: post #56

As the former CFO and a former SRE for Miraheze, I'm going to try to save the farm. I was uninvolved in the current problems, and at first was wondering what was going on so as to save my own wikis. The fundamentals at Miraheze are much better than they look; it's just that certain problems between volunteers got far out of hand, and with an all-volunteer force other people decided to leave to escape the drama. There…

On "starting a new nonprofit": yes please, it's about time to have an entity with proper accountability. Miraheze is mostly volunteer-run but it also needs a commercial side (such as selling premium features/support, and paying some people to handle them), so an obvious solution is a coop. I can help found a coop in Finland, where we have several long-standing MediaWiki devs, so that any EU person can easily particip…

Right now I am US based, and I'm thinking of incorporating in the US. Not because of any preference for the venue, but because of our limited resources and volunteer distribution. Honestly I'd prefer Canada, but as I am 2000 km away from there, it's not optimal for many of us. Anywhere in Europe would be better than being in the UK.

In any case I'm pretty sure we could get 501(c)3 public charity status, even though Miraheze missed out on charity status in the UK. If you could follow up on-wiki about co-op status as an option, I'd appreciate it.

On accountability: Members of the board need to come from the community and represent the community. Yes, it's true that no one tried to run for the board seats that were available, but people weren't encouraged to do so enough. I don't think the decisions were bad in and of themselves, but that not enough effort was made to get community support.

On paid premium features: I'm not opposed, but I want to see a business model that works without taking significant resources away from our free customers.

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