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Miraheze to shut down

meta.miraheze.org

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Re: Miraheze to shut down

#81

Post by bawolff »

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.

I think fundamentally the current ext management system works well for Wikimedia and really huge farms (I would include Miraheze in that. MediaWiki is open source and there are plenty of non-Wikimedia foundation developers, but there aren't very many from the small wiki farms communities, so stuff aimed at them doesn't really get done.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#82

Post by bawolff »

foobarbecue wrote: post #22

Was doing some reverse engineering recently and wanted a quick wiki to put stuff on in case others wanted to join in and contribute findings about the same product. Looked around and Miraheze seemed to be the only real option for free wiki hosting (I tried another one first, don't remember what it was called, but it was bad). Experience was pretty good adding the pages but then I went back 6 months later to try and c…

You can also self-host on a cheap server. apt install mediawiki

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#83

Post by labster »

Reception123 wrote: post #74
labster wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are problems that all small nonprofits face. I would love to pay people, but even having a commercial model doesn’t mean you escape questions about funding and staffing.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#84

Post by Nemo_bis »

bawolff wrote: post #80
Nemo_bis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure either. :D But having some explicit support directly in core hopefully means that we recognise wikifarm support as an essential feature and that over time there will be more collaboration to share good methods to run wikifarms. Multisite Wordpress also took a while to become good, IIRC.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#85

Post by Nemo_bis »

labster wrote: post #83
Reception123 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are problems that all small nonprofits face. I would love to pay people, but even having a commercial model doesn’t mean you escape questions about funding and staffing.

I agree with both. Hence I think it's better to have a legal structure which is flexible enough to allow multiple funding models.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#86

Post by Nemo_bis »

WikiTeam is working on the archival, with the usual XML dumps and image dumps. You can follow updates and see how to help:

https://github.com/WikiTeam/wikiteam/issues/465#issuecomment...

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Miraheze

Already before the announcement we had XML dumps for thousands of Miraheze wikis.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#87

Post by eudaemon »

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…

It was your bog-standard disk crash as I understand it. Pros were (eventually) brought in for data recovery. But I also understand the backup for the wikis on that server (like mine, one of the dead ones) was on the same server, which doesn't sound like a very good plan. If a backup was stored elsewhere, the dead wikis would have been restored in a very short time. Lesson learned, I hope.

I got most all of my data restored, but there was a temporary problem of deleting and replacing files that the server programming thought still existed. That was fixed quickly.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#88

Post by eudaemon »

labster wrote: post #62
eudaemon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Sitenotice is up. Thank you.

RE:communications I'd like to see more of.

1. The shutdown notice would have been one; important news, instead of only posting on Twitter and other social media. After a few tweets like "30,000 wikis!" (not all active, ahem), this just turns into noise.

2. Decisions made by the board. A summary will do.

3. Current or ongoing technical issues. Or do we have to go through the whole of outstanding Phabricator tasks?

This communication can be accomplished by subscription. I would then like to see a notification/bell made with a capsule of what's being shared and its location within the Miraheze maze.

On other business, check out Lithuania as a possible location. It's a very tech-oriented country, and I've worked on a MediaWiki-based wiki based there. I don't know the specific server farm or company.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#89

Post by bmacho »

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.

Do they have the private wikis too?
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