Amateur Radio Wiki talk:Organisation

Admin gone missing?
The Project:About page originally said that "ams that have the interest and necessary skills to form and be part of a foundation are invited to contact the owner at admin1@amateur-radio-wiki.net so that sensible discussion can take place." I have tried to contact Tim Roberts and haven't got a response yet. Furthermore, he seems to be inactive in the wiki for at least a year. I am therefore worried about the maintenance of this wiki. I am therefore publicly offering my help to maintain and support this install, but I would need more accesses to do that. I have made a backup of the wiki content and cleanup (see below) to make sure the existing work doesn't die. -- TheAnarcat 12:35, 17 October 2010 (CDT)


 * Admin is there, I got a ping from him, thanks tim! -- TheAnarcat 10:36, 18 October 2010 (CDT)

Backup script
I have worked on a Mediawiki backup script. It talks to the Special:Allpages and Special:Export pages to export the most recent version of every page of this wiki as a flat file. It then commits that to a git repository, which aims to be usable as a ikiwiki backend. The code is currently in a git repository, use this command to get a local copy:

git clone http://anarcat.ath.cx/software/mediawikigitdump.git/

You can do a backup with this:

mediawikigitdump.py http://amateur-radio-wiki.net/index.php

To restrict to a namespace (in this example, talk pages):

mediawikigitdump.py -n 1 http://amateur-radio-wiki.net/index.php

You can also convert the Mediawiki markup to markdown, the default format in Ikiwiki (see below):

mediawikigitdump.py -n 1 -t http://amateur-radio-wiki.net/index.php

To fetch only the last changes since the last commit:

mediawikigitdump.py -n 1 -t -i http://amateur-radio-wiki.net/index.php

This also works on Wikipedia, and can be useful to get a local copy of all the ham pages, since we can fetch by category:

mediawikigitdump.py -c Category:Amateur_radio http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php

Be careful with Wikipedia: you can't really mirror all of wikipedia with this, and there are better tools out there to do that anyways. In fact, it's recommended that datamining on Wikipedia occurs on a separate database that you can can download separately.

I am making regular copies of this wiki while we look for tim. -- TheAnarcat 12:47, 17 October 2010 (CDT)

Ikiwiki?
Since we're on that topic, I'd like to introduce another wiki engine called Ikiwiki. The above scripts makes some efforts to make the resulting backup usable as a Ikiwiki backend, and while that work isn't complete, it would now be trivial to convert this wiki for an almost completely operational ikiwiki site.

Ikiwiki is interesting for hams as it will work even if the central server (or the internet) is down: being based on git, you can download a copy of the full history of the wiki locally, make changes using a regular editor (and therefore offline) and then push that back to the central wiki once network is available again. This seems to me like a killer feature for hams in emergency operations that want a quick reference (and of course that have power to operate a computer, otherwise books still work! :).

The drawback of ikiwiki is that the user interface of ikiwiki is not very intuitive, or let's say very minimal compared to the polished Mediawiki interface. I particularly like the talk pages, categories and templating system (or transclusion) in MW. In ikiwiki, there's a good tagging system to replace categories, but talk pages are not as nice and I'm not sure there's transclusion. We also need to see if redirections are supported.

I am therefore not advocating that we change wiki engines just yet: too much work, too much confusion, and it could push away our precious little number of contributors. But it's something I'll keep in mind. See also this page for more information on how to convert to ikiwiki. -- TheAnarcat 12:47, 17 October 2010 (CDT)