My understanding is that the basic structure of Wikiapiary is firstly a
system of templates etc that stores data from the sites' pages into SMW
and then reads it out for various reports; and secondly the scripts that
populate the wikitext pages with data fetched from the sites (and
extensions etc). The really valuable bits to me are the fact of having a
categorized/tagged index to MediaWiki sites, and the extension
popularity info. The first part of that is most valuable as a
human-curated thing, so I think that'd make sense to get back online
even if it wasn't bot-updated. The extension and other site info is
silly to update by hand, but there isn't an absolute reason that the
bots doing the updating need to be part of the WikiApiary
infrastructure, so perhaps if WikiApiary was online, a new system of
fetching site info could be built.
Then, of course, is the separate issue of *how* to store the info on the
wiki. It's SMW at the moment, but it sounds like that hits some resource
issues given the number of queries being run and the amount of data.
Would Cargo be better? I feel like switching to that would be not an
insurmountable thing to do (compared to say moving to Wikibase to store
the data, which would be a bigger restructure). The individual sites'
pages mightn't even need to be changed (if all the storage/querying
logic is in templates and modules).
I vote for bringing it online again now, even if it's without SMW or the
bots, and updating it to the latest MediaWiki. If any of that's possible
of course.
Thank you for working on it! I'm not sure how much time I've got to
help, but I'd love to try.
—Sam
On 27/12/23 08:47, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
Triple Camera <triplecam...@outlook.com> writes:
The database has been locked for half a year, Bots and editors are
waiting, and they are losing patience. I believe the most urgent thing
to do is to make WikiApiary back online as soon as possible.
If we brought WikiApiary back online right now without the bots, would
that be acceptable?
I'm trying to understand what you need from the site and how you've used
it, so any information you have would be useful.
If you or other users of the site can let us know how you would like to
use it, that well help us make sure we are able bring it back online in
as useful a way as possible.
Mark.
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