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Miraheze to shut down

meta.miraheze.org

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Re: Miraheze to shut down

#71

Post by Nemo_bis »

labster wrote: post #70
Nemo_bis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 M…

It's very difficult to set up a proper non-profit able to handle both donations and commercial services in the USA. You'll end up spending fortunes on laywers. It's much easier to use a jurisdiction where the law already does all the legal job for you.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#72

Post by labster »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #71
labster wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 M…

It's very difficult to set up a proper non-profit able to handle both donations and commercial services in the USA. You'll end up spending fortunes on laywers. It's much easier to use a jurisdiction where the law already does all the legal job for you.

That is a very good point. Thanks!

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#73

Post by tinus_hn »

Xen9 wrote: post #44
creatonez wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a free wiki host run by a UK non-profit, pretty much the only free wiki host that has no ads whatsoever and also offers a reasonable selection of Mediawiki extensions. There are thousands, but some examples of popular wikis hosted on Miraheze: - NATO Cyberlaw Toolkit - https://cyberlaw.ccdcoe.org/wiki/Main_Page (Yes, an intergovernmental military alliance with infinite money is using a free wiki host) - Loat…

Such great wikis. And funny but true characterization... "with infinite money" I'm broke but would give these the Wikis a new home if I had money.

It’s probably not just about money but also the fact you have to pick your administrators from the pool of people willing to deal with the interpersonal drama and legal headaches that come with those projects.

So that would be people looking for a captive audience and that’s typically for a reason.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#74

Post by Reception123 »

labster wrote: post #72
Nemo_bis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very difficult to set up a proper non-profit able to handle both donations and commercial services in the USA. You'll end up spending fortunes on laywers. It's much easier to use a jurisdiction where the law already does all the legal job for you.

That is a very good point. Thanks!

That's a fair point but on the other hand I've been at Miraheze for almost 8 years and having such a huge operation rely on a few unpaid volunteers isn't realistic in the long term and people burnout, lose interest or both. There's also the anxiety of knowing that the fate of the farm depends on a yearly (or even more frequent) fundraiser.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#75

Post by OrigAuthority »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #40
cxr wrote: post #2

This is a bummer. Miraheze is/was a wiki farm that provided a free Mediawiki-based wiki to pretty much anyone who was able to articulate a reason and fill out a request to be given one. This was invaluable in an age where the term "wiki" has become so debased that "a bunch of Markdown files in a GitHub repo" is, against all good taste and reason, considered a wiki. Miraheze was supported by donations, which is almost…

Another comment mentions that a lot of the volunteers on this projects have moved on to a similar project called WikiTide, and that's the "recent events" mentioned in the article. https://meta.wikitide.com/wiki/WikiTide does seem like they offer a similar thing (though, of course, Lindy's law applies regarding its reliability/viability).

The thing with that is that is is the same people that ran Miraheze that have forked, so the thinking behind it will be the same, and it largely has been — they've copied verbatim all of Miraheze's policies and stuff, so I doubt the systemic problemls experienced will be different.

You can also check out https://meta.telepedia.net/wiki/Telepedia_Meta_Wiki if your wiki is about entertainment.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#76

Post by tinus_hn »

cxr wrote: post #55
Blahah wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confusing - what about the free github and gitlab wikis? And all the free wiki hosts? And tiddlywiki which has been freely hosted tons of places for 20 years or so?

> what about the free github and gitlab wikis Don't fall for the trap; those aren't wikis. Just because someone (or a company) uses the word "wiki" when describing something, that doesn't make it one.

Try the SharePoint wiki for a laugh.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#77

Post by iamacyborg »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #66
tallies wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh man, thanks for providing those wikiteam tools, they’ve been a huge help in a large fork off of fandom!

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#78

Post by iamacyborg »

arp242 wrote: post #42
iamacyborg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, Google actively penalises wikis that choose to fork from Fandom.

They penalise duplicate content because 999 out of 1000 times it's spam. It's a bit of an issue forking any site, and one reason you might be better off just starting over.

Easier said than done when you’re dealing with tens of thousands of pages and a decade of content.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#79

Post by iamacyborg »

resolutebat wrote: post #43
iamacyborg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, Google actively penalises wikis that choose to fork from Fandom.

The algorithm penalizes copies of content that are newer than the original, which punishes spam and forks alike.

Yep, with no recourse for manual intervention, even if the new site is better in all ways.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#80

Post by bawolff »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #69
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...

TBH, I don't really see what the new settings stuff offers over the status quo. It feels like a complex abstraction layer to do what everyone was already doing already.
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