Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA384 Hi, I'm Kudu, the co-founder of Orain (https://orain.org), a new non-profit wiki farm. Although it's pretty new and constantly changing, I think it's pretty similar to what many of you might have had in mind: community-led, free, ad-free and technologically advanced (MW 1.22wmf22, CDN, SSL/TLS, and more to come). We're also taking an open approach by developing our software openly as free software, including our server configuration (Ansible playbook): https://github.com/Orain Please note that our code is a work in progress. I think our organization would be a good fit to potentially be officially supported by MediaWiki, since, as a non-profit, we invest all our donations into our servers. We currently cater to two types of wikis: public wikis (open, CC-licensed) and certain private wikis. The only type of private wikis we're currently accepting are those that in some way benefit society or the advancement of education, e.g. a wiki request we got recently for a philosophy collaboration project between teachers. They could also be non-profits, libraries, etc. In the future, we will consider expanding to the wikis that don't fit into those categories, such as personal wikis, company wikis, etc. Those may be ad-supported or paid for a small fee. Those could also include custom SSO integration, etc. Feel free to drop by our IRC channel (#orain on freenode) or reply to this message if you have any questions or feedback. :) Regards, - -Kudu. On 10/14/13 10:41 PM, Quim Gil wrote: On 10/02/2013 06:33 PM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote: Did you see the Orain wikifarm? https://meta.orain.org/ No, I hadn't. But I followed your advice, I checked it out, tested the service with a wiki that some friends wanted to create and got to know the main contributors. Thank you! It's a very interesting community project run by wikipedians that love MediaWiki. In fact I find it has some relation to this discussion and the possibilities suggested by Brion, Ori, Ryan, Mark... You are talking about an affordable Turbo service for power users and they are providing a free Diesel service for anybody. But no just any diesel, check https://meta.orain.org/wiki/Special:Version MediaWiki 1.22wmf16, MariaDB, Scribunto and more if you ask for it. and see also their projects to maintain their farm at https://github.com/Orain https://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbook/blob/master/roles/mediawiki/tasks/main.yml These people are clearly aligned with what this community is developing. They also seem to be having a similar vision about maintaining instances pulling from repositories, etc. If some of you think they could improve their approach I'm sure they would be happy to listen and discuss. Now I imagine the combination of this free-for-all service with the affordable DIY setup you were describing and I see a great service for the community, yes. Post Disclaimer: today I donated to Orain.org to support the initiative. An hour later they convinced me to move my pet project there. I wasn't amused about having to update core and extensions when MW 1.22 was out. Now my site is running basically the latest you can find out of the Wikimedia servers. And I will concentrate on my users and content. Happy. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.20 (Darwin) iQIcBAEBCQAGBQJSZbB4AAoJEMG+LL161/I7PmkP/jSeO1csxFT0a40I0O1mPXOt BtY7j1BvR3cChQbBmRqXacyzWORz/KzgrCjnGSafQnIwCN5hEGyyS+l7y69cfv4p ma69b3JLAPCRpSXpWM/H6RxOq7HlaQ8dJeXf123GCF8q4DIUxasTdv6J6G8/+q2y KQPqtNvjbEn0egew0L/6y5y0/Y+cYAW2v8Dfk3SaMwCTD5FDKNDTPWkDshqeh67I z6mFgiGFwpjN5euhFrv0+JXY2luT+I25IDSFciR5oCMS8OTsllhhnsjK190q8aTy O0zfiLNeEVnax3yIQ4RcZ30z99k+h/dhEFFMfPEohLSP12qdFOCUFDOOgRJJUNgN w5d3jdVnitqPu4xmIS1s15pGgYHFHTR3oNhJL7Qpj9UK1L2ZiQydWT2JuN+KnI4X 6Sc8yCxE6rZTufU3kS7i3+afIeknit4u74E/vkhk6WlwWeeWFNcWY8DCKX9GHupZ QMbH9Q7Mqlf/vWv/JobCBzkmc41+8YPn0QKoIlJpwiKpy1O8leubgIKQQrB/isV9 zjA3gBKBVgyv/o3Uw3Cc0Ml2hsio9c+O996NwQpeV8qYrPAE5Fw0BcKpkhAGRi1c t8o+LkFow8mL59RV2XpYJtAAWprfj1/I7DyeDoFtqDp2piXNr2Qza4TFUa5jmI/9 IZnsG1Na8qyG5cinpTFj =BOgL -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
Glad to hear you like it! :) On 15 October 2013 04:41, Quim Gil q...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 10/02/2013 06:33 PM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote: Did you see the Orain wikifarm? https://meta.orain.org/ No, I hadn't. But I followed your advice, I checked it out, tested the service with a wiki that some friends wanted to create and got to know the main contributors. Thank you! It's a very interesting community project run by wikipedians that love MediaWiki. In fact I find it has some relation to this discussion and the possibilities suggested by Brion, Ori, Ryan, Mark... You are talking about an affordable Turbo service for power users and they are providing a free Diesel service for anybody. But no just any diesel, check https://meta.orain.org/wiki/**Special:Versionhttps://meta.orain.org/wiki/Special:Version MediaWiki 1.22wmf16, MariaDB, Scribunto and more if you ask for it. and see also their projects to maintain their farm at https://github.com/Orain https://github.com/Orain/**ansible-playbook/blob/master/** roles/mediawiki/tasks/main.ymlhttps://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbook/blob/master/roles/mediawiki/tasks/main.yml These people are clearly aligned with what this community is developing. They also seem to be having a similar vision about maintaining instances pulling from repositories, etc. If some of you think they could improve their approach I'm sure they would be happy to listen and discuss. Now I imagine the combination of this free-for-all service with the affordable DIY setup you were describing and I see a great service for the community, yes. Post Disclaimer: today I donated to Orain.org to support the initiative. An hour later they convinced me to move my pet project there. I wasn't amused about having to update core and extensions when MW 1.22 was out. Now my site is running basically the latest you can find out of the Wikimedia servers. And I will concentrate on my users and content. Happy. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/**User:Qgilhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil __**_ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikitech-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
At 20:11 01/10/2013, Brion Vibber wrote: Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? Brion, I am a lead user, i.e. not a competent nor professionnal developper, but someone with a need that he intends to address himself if there is no other way (I did it several times including once a distributed real time multimachine OS based on QNX, a 3.000 sites experimentation, etc.). I observe that most of my current needs would be solved through what I name intellipages, i.e. intelligent standalone (single page wiki) or grouped (billion page wiki) pages plus a content centered accessing solution (can be a DDDS or semantic access). My needs are compacity, ubiquity, versatility, mobility, access security, backup, simplicity, replication, etc. I am not interested in wiki softwares: I am interested in what can be updated on a wiki page. I currently run more than 30 personnal working specialized [media]wikis (not big ones, often created in a few minutes and updated as time goes). I have queries from many people who would like to work the same. I have projects for many of them. With extensions. My plan (I am beginning, so may be I will discover this cannot work) is to start from an existing wiki softaculous configuration on my windows machine and a copy of the same on my linux hosting company. As I did not find an A to Z architectural description manual, my target is to discover it by reverse engineering of the programs and databases relations. The target is to understand how to split the whole thing in two parts: a wiki craddle (software programs/protocols) and wiki containers (data, metadata, syllodata) I can (plural) dock, plug and play in the craddle. In the process I will probably need to document an interwiki protocol to suppervise the whole thing and the parallel/remote replication/backup/local-global-updating. The cradre is what is to be updated by developpers. The content is what is to be updated, replicated and backuped by users. The cradle/container development ballance to be advised by architects. The probable value added services by (paid/non-profit) operators. Hope this possibly crazy input might help. jfc [Please do not consider the existence of this email to imply that only regular posters on wikitech-l are allowed to read, comment on, or give opinions in this matter -- on the contrary, wider input is being requested. Please forward this question to anyone to whom it may be of interest. If you would like to get more input from other people, please feel free to contact them on your own, with or without a forward of this mail, and to make follow-up posts or comments as you need or want to. Please feel free to modify the question, the idea, the proposal, or make comments or additions. Be bold and get involved!] -- brion ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On 10/02/2013 06:33 PM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote: Did you see the Orain wikifarm? https://meta.orain.org/ No, I hadn't. But I followed your advice, I checked it out, tested the service with a wiki that some friends wanted to create and got to know the main contributors. Thank you! It's a very interesting community project run by wikipedians that love MediaWiki. In fact I find it has some relation to this discussion and the possibilities suggested by Brion, Ori, Ryan, Mark... You are talking about an affordable Turbo service for power users and they are providing a free Diesel service for anybody. But no just any diesel, check https://meta.orain.org/wiki/Special:Version MediaWiki 1.22wmf16, MariaDB, Scribunto and more if you ask for it. and see also their projects to maintain their farm at https://github.com/Orain https://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbook/blob/master/roles/mediawiki/tasks/main.yml These people are clearly aligned with what this community is developing. They also seem to be having a similar vision about maintaining instances pulling from repositories, etc. If some of you think they could improve their approach I'm sure they would be happy to listen and discuss. Now I imagine the combination of this free-for-all service with the affordable DIY setup you were describing and I see a great service for the community, yes. Post Disclaimer: today I donated to Orain.org to support the initiative. An hour later they convinced me to move my pet project there. I wasn't amused about having to update core and extensions when MW 1.22 was out. Now my site is running basically the latest you can find out of the Wikimedia servers. And I will concentrate on my users and content. Happy. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On 10/01/2013 02:53 PM, Brion Vibber wrote: Ideally, my vision of a general-purpose wiki hosting service would provide options that orgs like Wikia generally don't. If there is an effort to work with hosting providers, I would suggest finding a way to work with a large number of providers rather than working with individual providers. For example, find a way to work with CPanel and VirtualMin as well as larger providers like Amazon's EC2. This, along with Fedora and Debian packages, would make the whole certification process easier. Mark. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 7:57 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Ori Livneh o...@wikimedia.org wrote: Foundation could play in ensuring that MediaWiki exposes the right set of interfaces for deep integration with configuration management and cloud provisioning platforms, and ensuring that these interfaces are intuitive and well-documented. This might actually spur some innovation. Puppet, chef, salt stack, cfengine, CloudFormation, OpenStack, etc? do you mean CloudFoundry, the Pivotal thing? http://www.cloudfoundry.com/ ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On 10/01/2013 04:34 PM, Ori Livneh wrote: I don't like this every time you have a new idea, God kills a Community member approach. Ori, I like your work on MediaWiki-Vagrant -- surely a new idea! -- but I'd also like you to consider the needs of people who don't have access to the infrastructure or know-how that you do. For example, many long-time users of MediaWiki would like to use the VisualEditor, but only have the ability to run PHP and, if they're lucky, get some PHP modules installed. So VE is a non-starter. The approach taken on Scribunto, though -- forking out a bundled lua binary -- works even on shared hosting. I've even managed to get it working on GoDaddy's notorious hosting. This isn't directed so much at you, but I when it comes to these new ideas, I'd like to see more thought given to the installed base of MediaWiki sites. More of the Lua approach and ways to adapt the Parsoid-type features to those people with fewer resources. Thinking about community members may not be the easiest thing to do, but it pays off. -- Mark A. Hershberger NicheWork LLC 717-271-1084 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 10:30 AM, Mark A. Hershberger m...@nichework.com wrote: The approach taken on Scribunto, though -- forking out a bundled lua binary -- works even on shared hosting. I've even managed to get it working on GoDaddy's notorious hosting. Works on *some* shared hosting. We had problems for a while where many people with shared hosting running CentOS 5 couldn't run the provided binaries because their glibc was too old. Finally I installed CentOS 5 in VirtualBox and recompiled Lua against the older glibc. And then there are the shared hosts that mount the users' directories with 'noexec', or that add proc_open to disable_functions in php.ini, or the like. There's nothing we can do for them. Also note that the bundled binaries solution won't help much if you need to shell out to something like nodejs.[1] In that case you'd probably have to go with requiring the end user to download and install nodejs separately. [1]: Lua binaries for Windows (32- and 64-bit), Linux (32- and 64-bit), and OS X Lion total 1.3M. A similar set of nodejs binaries downloaded from nodejs.org totals 42M, which would be a lot to bundle. And yes, that's just the binaries and not all the other files included in the binary tar.gz. -- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On 10/01/2013 02:53 PM, Brion Vibber wrote: Ideally, my vision of a general-purpose wiki hosting service would provide options that orgs like Wikia generally don't. If there is an effort to work with hosting providers, I would suggest finding a way to work with a large number of providers rather than working with individual providers. For example, find a way to work with CPanel and VirtualMin as well as larger providers like Amazon's EC2. This, along with Fedora and Debian packages, would make the whole certification process easier. Mark. At a minimum we could provide information to hosts regarding what the minimum requirements are to run the latest versions if fully configured. Often they install the software but as old as 1.17. Fred ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On 10/02/2013 11:16 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote: On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 10:30 AM, Mark A. Hershberger m...@nichework.com wrote: The approach taken on Scribunto, though -- forking out a bundled lua binary -- works even on shared hosting. I've even managed to get it working on GoDaddy's notorious hosting. Works on *some* shared hosting. We had problems for a while where many people with shared hosting running CentOS 5 couldn't run the provided binaries because their glibc was too old. Finally I installed CentOS 5 in VirtualBox and recompiled Lua against the older glibc. Did you try the binaries from these RPMs? http://pkgs.repoforge.org/lua/ Even if you can't install the RPM, maybe you could extract the lua binary and use it. Mark. -- Mark A. Hershberger NicheWork LLC 717-271-1084 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
One intermediate position might be for WMF to distribute virtual machine images which can easily be installed on any one of a number of different hosting services. OpenStack/Glance appears to be one such system, although ops probably knows better. The current efforts with puppet and vagrant are pretty close to this goal, all that's missing is identifying some appropriate hosting services and closing the documentation gap. This would also allow our existing community of MediaWiki hosting services to migrate to the new VM-and-image-based model. --scott ps. as far as a business model goes for a MW hosting company, it would be interesting to pattern it after github -- no charge for open wikis (mandatory CC licensing, perhaps with ads, perhaps with size restrictions, perhaps some amount of central auth and vandal protection baked in), but reasonable plans for private wikis (with flexible authentication integration and https support so that you can integrate it into your company's infrastructure). ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 7:02 AM, Chris McMahon cmcma...@wikimedia.orgwrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 7:57 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Ori Livneh o...@wikimedia.org wrote: Foundation could play in ensuring that MediaWiki exposes the right set of interfaces for deep integration with configuration management and cloud provisioning platforms, and ensuring that these interfaces are intuitive and well-documented. This might actually spur some innovation. Puppet, chef, salt stack, cfengine, CloudFormation, OpenStack, etc? do you mean CloudFoundry, the Pivotal thing? http://www.cloudfoundry.com/ No, the AWS Cloudformation ( http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/ ). Handles system deployment coordination / customization / cluster management, dynamic scaling interface, etc. It's not the same as the others, but they all play in the space of being management components for large managed system deployments. We appear not to have a WP article on it, which I may remedy, but not today. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
- Original Message - From: Ryan Lane rlan...@gmail.com On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 12:48 PM, C. Scott Ananian canan...@wikimedia.orgwrote: One intermediate position might be for WMF to distribute virtual machine images I'd rather provide cloud-init scripts with instructions on how to use them. The cloud init script could pull and run a puppet module, or a salt module, or etc. etc.. Providing images kind of sucks. Ok, time for me to throw an oar in the water, as an ops and support guy. My perception of Brion's use of officially supported was, roughly, whomever is providing support to these hosting customers has a direct, *formal* line of communication to the development staff. The reason you build images, and version the images, is that it provides a clear solid baseline for people providing such support to know (and, preferably, be able to put their fingers on) exactly the release you're running, so they can give you clear and correct answers -- it's not just going to be the Mediawiki release number that's the issue there. That's impossible to do reliably if you pull the code down and build it sui generis on each customer's machine... which is what I understand Ryan to be suggesting. It's a little more work to build images, but you're not throwing it away; you get it back in reduced support costs. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: - Original Message - From: Ryan Lane rlan...@gmail.com On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 12:48 PM, C. Scott Ananian canan...@wikimedia.orgwrote: One intermediate position might be for WMF to distribute virtual machine images I'd rather provide cloud-init scripts with instructions on how to use them. The cloud init script could pull and run a puppet module, or a salt module, or etc. etc.. Providing images kind of sucks. Ok, time for me to throw an oar in the water, as an ops and support guy. My perception of Brion's use of officially supported was, roughly, whomever is providing support to these hosting customers has a direct, *formal* line of communication to the development staff. The reason you build images, and version the images, is that it provides a clear solid baseline for people providing such support to know (and, preferably, be able to put their fingers on) exactly the release you're running, so they can give you clear and correct answers -- it's not just going to be the Mediawiki release number that's the issue there. That's impossible to do reliably if you pull the code down and build it sui generis on each customer's machine... which is what I understand Ryan to be suggesting. It's a little more work to build images, but you're not throwing it away; you get it back in reduced support costs. No. I'm suggesting that we provide cloud-init scripts [1] to let people seed their virtual instances. It would pull down a puppet, salt, chef, juju, etc. repository which would then install all the prerequisites, start all the necessary services, install MediaWiki, and maybe install and configure a number of extensions. We could skip cloud-init completely for some of these. I think vagrant has ec2 [2] and openstack [3] providers. salt stack has salt-cloud [4] (or you could use salty vagrant [5]). Some of these also already have mediawiki modules created and usable. In fact, juju uses MediaWiki for demo purposes relatively often. WMF has a usable puppet module. I wrote a salt module for webplatform.org, which we'll be publishing soon. The nice part about this is that it's all configuration managed, can be versioned and could also be used to upgrade MediaWiki and all related infrastructure. Images are a pain in the ass to build and maintain (I build and maintain images), you need to keep them updated because the image will be insecure otherwise, and they are giant. They are also way less flexible. - Ryan [1] http://cloudinit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ [2] https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws [3] https://github.com/cloudbau/vagrant-openstack-plugin [4] https://github.com/saltstack/salt-cloud [5] https://github.com/saltstack/salty-vagrant ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 11:11 AM, Brion Vibber bvib...@wikimedia.org wrote: Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? I have needed such a thing for wikis for small non-profits/library associations that I've been involved with, where I didn't want to host it myself (because I didn't want to take personal responsibility for the site of an organization that I might not stay involved with, and because I don't really have the chops to deal with security and spam issues); but also did not have a good hosting option with a larger organization or library, which I find are often not very familiar with mediawiki (e.g. I've been trying to get our library systems dept. to install some basic extensions for our internal mediawiki for a couple years now). There's not a lot of money in that particular use case, unfortunately, but I imagine I'm not alone in that need either. -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On 10/02/2013 07:17 PM, phoebe ayers wrote: I have needed such a thing for wikis for small non-profits/library associations that I've been involved with, where I didn't want to host it myself (because I didn't want to take personal responsibility for the site of an organization that I might not stay involved with, and because I don't really have the chops to deal with security and spam issues); but also did not have a good hosting option with a larger organization or library, which I find are often not very familiar with mediawiki (e.g. I've been trying to get our library systems dept. to install some basic extensions for our internal mediawiki for a couple years now). There's not a lot of money in that particular use case, unfortunately, but I imagine I'm not alone in that need either. Did you see the Orain wikifarm? https://meta.orain.org/ It seems to be targeted to the non-profit use case. Mark. -- Mark A. Hershberger NicheWork LLC 717-271-1084 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
I have a wiki there, and Orain is actually pretty decent as wiki farms go, though they could probably use more regular staff members. It is non profit for the forseeable future, though ads have been discussed only as in opt in option for those that want them. Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2013 21:33:35 -0400 From: m...@nichework.com To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service? On 10/02/2013 07:17 PM, phoebe ayers wrote: I have needed such a thing for wikis for small non-profits/library associations that I've been involved with, where I didn't want to host it myself (because I didn't want to take personal responsibility for the site of an organization that I might not stay involved with, and because I don't really have the chops to deal with security and spam issues); but also did not have a good hosting option with a larger organization or library, which I find are often not very familiar with mediawiki (e.g. I've been trying to get our library systems dept. to install some basic extensions for our internal mediawiki for a couple years now). There's not a lot of money in that particular use case, unfortunately, but I imagine I'm not alone in that need either. Did you see the Orain wikifarm? https://meta.orain.org/ It seems to be targeted to the non-profit use case. Mark. -- Mark A. Hershberger NicheWork LLC 717-271-1084 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? [Please do not consider the existence of this email to imply that only regular posters on wikitech-l are allowed to read, comment on, or give opinions in this matter -- on the contrary, wider input is being requested. Please forward this question to anyone to whom it may be of interest. If you would like to get more input from other people, please feel free to contact them on your own, with or without a forward of this mail, and to make follow-up posts or comments as you need or want to. Please feel free to modify the question, the idea, the proposal, or make comments or additions. Be bold and get involved!] -- brion ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
I think Brion should have expressed some distinction between Wiki services (like Wikia), and hosting services that provide everything for MediaWiki to run smoothly, incl. caching software and other fancy stuff. On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: Something other than Wikia, then? - Original Message - From: Brion Vibber bvib...@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia-tech list wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, October 1, 2013 2:11:16 PM Subject: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service? Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? [Please do not consider the existence of this email to imply that only regular posters on wikitech-l are allowed to read, comment on, or give opinions in this matter -- on the contrary, wider input is being requested. Please forward this question to anyone to whom it may be of interest. If you would like to get more input from other people, please feel free to contact them on your own, with or without a forward of this mail, and to make follow-up posts or comments as you need or want to. Please feel free to modify the question, the idea, the proposal, or make comments or additions. Be bold and get involved!] -- brion ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- З павагай, Павел Селіцкас/Pavel Selitskas Wizardist @ Wikimedia projects ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On 2013-10-01 3:11 PM, Brion Vibber bvib...@wikimedia.org wrote: Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? [Please do not consider the existence of this email to imply that only regular posters on wikitech-l are allowed to read, comment on, or give opinions in this matter -- on the contrary, wider input is being requested. Please forward this question to anyone to whom it may be of interest. If you would like to get more input from other people, please feel free to contact them on your own, with or without a forward of this mail, and to make follow-up posts or comments as you need or want to. Please feel free to modify the question, the idea, the proposal, or make comments or additions. Be bold and get involved!] -- brion ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l I know this is not your question - but officially supported by whom? I would consider this massively out of scope for the wmf unless it was using revenue from this service to subsidize wikipedia. Even then it seems somewhat questionable, politically. Ignoring the politics of such a move, I think it would be cool. -bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: Something other than Wikia, then? On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Paul Selitskas p.selits...@gmail.comwrote: I think Brion should have expressed some distinction between Wiki services (like Wikia), and hosting services that provide everything for MediaWiki to run smoothly, incl. caching software and other fancy stuff. Ideally, my vision of a general-purpose wiki hosting service would provide options that orgs like Wikia generally don't. Wikia for instance covers fan encyclopedia type projects very well -- open access, openish license, free ad-supported hosting, casual user ownership with public backups. I'm thinking more along the lines of covering some of those folks who right now are setting up quick ad-hoc installs on their own servers or shared hosting, and then possibly not maintaining the software for years because they have better things to do than figure out how to update and tweak the software. (Right now I have the impression many of those folks have everything work great until it does eventually break or needs an update...) * ability to disable ads for a reasonable cost (or perhaps waived for certain approved projects) * ability to customize your skin! * ability to control or restrict access (limited access, custom auth integration, etc) * ability to host on your own domain * ability to host on SSL * ability to write, install and run custom extensions * custom writing, testing, and maintenance of custom extensions * service tracking down and fixing bugs * etc This might mean customers span a range of actual hosting methods, from generic wiki on a farm-style cluster (like Wikimedia and Wikia's primary wiki hosting) to you pay for a dedicated VPS mini-cluster for your custom code to we run dedicated servers for your expensive custom site, perhaps all the way to we provide consulting and support to help with your own server setup. There are some folks doing contracting/services and hosting on smaller scales, but we don't really have good coordination or a end-user-facing place we can point people for comprehensive support. Perhaps we just need to coordinate the people doing support and hosting already, or perhaps we should consider organizing something either under, or separately from, WMF... I'm not going to make any specific demands at this point, I've just been itching to see something happen on this front for years. :) -- brion - Original Message - From: Brion Vibber bvib...@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia-tech list wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, October 1, 2013 2:11:16 PM Subject: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service? Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? [Please do not consider the existence of this email to imply that only regular posters on wikitech-l are allowed to read, comment on, or give opinions in this matter -- on the contrary, wider input is being requested. Please forward this question to anyone to whom it may be of interest. If you would like to get more input from other people, please feel free to contact them on your own, with or without a forward of this mail, and to make follow-up posts or comments as you need or want to. Please feel free to modify the question, the idea, the proposal, or make comments or additions. Be bold and get involved!] -- brion ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- З павагай, Павел Селіцкас/Pavel Selitskas Wizardist @ Wikimedia projects ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On 2013-10-01 11:43 AM, Brian Wolff wrote: I know this is not your question - but officially supported by whom? I would consider this massively out of scope for the wmf unless it was using revenue from this service to subsidize wikipedia. Even then it seems somewhat questionable, politically. Ignoring the politics of such a move, I think it would be cool. -bawolff There's always the generic idea of MediaWiki Foundation[1] we've been discussing or the MediaWiki Development Chapter[2] focused iteration on that idea I never completed the page for. The scope could easily be expanded to also support hosting. And it would be a beautiful place to do it in. Besides just donations, make some profit from hosting MediaWiki installations, and then use that profit to pay more former volunteers to squash bugs and make random features and improvements to MediaWiki full-time. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/MediaWiki_Foundation [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/MediaWiki_Development_Chapter ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/] ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Brian Wolff bawo...@gmail.com wrote: I know this is not your question - but officially supported by whom? I would consider this massively out of scope for the wmf unless it was using revenue from this service to subsidize wikipedia. Even then it seems somewhat questionable, politically. Excellent question: I'd say the key officialness markers of a hosting/support organization would be: * the org has permission to use the MediaWiki name/logo/domains (need agreement with WMF?) * MediaWiki documentation endorses the organization doing the hosting/support (need general consensus with the developers, many but not all of whom are WMF employees) I'd expect conditions of such would tend to include: * the org invests its time, money, and people back into MediaWiki development The actual organization could (maybe should?) be distinct from WMF; whether it could be a wholly-owned subsidiary like Mozilla's Mozilla Corporation, or a separate mini-company like our MediaWiki release management team, or something else is something I feel needs a lot more input. -- brion ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? [Please do not consider the existence of this email to imply that only regular posters on wikitech-l are allowed to read, comment on, or give opinions in this matter -- on the contrary, wider input is being requested. Please forward this question to anyone to whom it may be of interest. If you would like to get more input from other people, please feel free to contact them on your own, with or without a forward of this mail, and to make follow-up posts or comments as you need or want to. Please feel free to modify the question, the idea, the proposal, or make comments or additions. Be bold and get involved!] -- brion Absolutely. I'm trying to run Wikinfo.co on a host that doesn't have up to date infrastructure, I may succeed yet, but trying to get Lua to work involves heroics I despise (software is not fun for me, even if it is to you). I suspect most of these VPS's are similar, packages of rather old software that work but can't be easily updated or modified. I can run the inside of a wiki, but begging for support, or paying for it, or trying to update installations that were not meant to be updated could be avoided by a host that was built with the latest versions and features of MediaWiki supported. For a minor example Tidy could come installed. People from this group could even anticipate requirements of future versions. Fred ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
Le 01/10/13 20:43, Brian Wolff a écrit : I know this is not your question - but officially supported by whom? I would consider this massively out of scope for the wmf unless it was using revenue from this service to subsidize wikipedia. Even then it seems somewhat questionable, politically. You are a step ahead in the discussion. Brion is merely asking if there is any interest. Figuring whom would be the next step. -- Antoine hashar Musso ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
the org has permission to use the MediaWiki name/logo/domains Name and Logo sure -- but why domains? This shouldn't be an exclusive thing; we should not be moving towards having only one shop offering this service. Maybe the WMF could have some sort of 'partners' program that handled licensing. MediaWiki documentation endorses the organization doing the hosting/support (need general consensus with the developers, many but not all of whom are WMF employees) I don't think I can express how much I loathe organizations that do this. Varnish and Adiscon (rsyslog) are two offenders that come to mind. It seems to create an ecosystem where a new user assumes they must use the hosting provider for an install. And/or that any new features the vendor develops can be locked away and never documented except very sketchily in code. I don't mind having a page on mediawiki.org that would say something along the lines of 'if you dont want to host yourself...' but otherwise I feel the documentation / main site should be kept as neutral as possible. ~Matt Walker Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising Technology Team On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:03 PM, Brion Vibber bvib...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Brian Wolff bawo...@gmail.com wrote: I know this is not your question - but officially supported by whom? I would consider this massively out of scope for the wmf unless it was using revenue from this service to subsidize wikipedia. Even then it seems somewhat questionable, politically. Excellent question: I'd say the key officialness markers of a hosting/support organization would be: * the org has permission to use the MediaWiki name/logo/domains (need agreement with WMF?) * MediaWiki documentation endorses the organization doing the hosting/support (need general consensus with the developers, many but not all of whom are WMF employees) I'd expect conditions of such would tend to include: * the org invests its time, money, and people back into MediaWiki development The actual organization could (maybe should?) be distinct from WMF; whether it could be a wholly-owned subsidiary like Mozilla's Mozilla Corporation, or a separate mini-company like our MediaWiki release management team, or something else is something I feel needs a lot more input. -- brion ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
quote name=Matthew Walker date=2013-10-01 time=12:32:08 -0700 the org has permission to use the MediaWiki name/logo/domains Name and Logo sure -- but why domains? This shouldn't be an exclusive thing; we should not be moving towards having only one shop offering this service. Maybe the WMF could have some sort of 'partners' program that handled licensing. only if domain includes the trademark, of course. MediaWiki documentation endorses the organization doing the hosting/support (need general consensus with the developers, many but not all of whom are WMF employees) I don't think I can express how much I loathe organizations that do this. Varnish and Adiscon (rsyslog) are two offenders that come to mind. It seems to create an ecosystem where a new user assumes they must use the hosting provider for an install. And/or that any new features the vendor develops can be locked away and never documented except very sketchily in code. I don't mind having a page on mediawiki.org that would say something along the lines of 'if you dont want to host yourself...' but otherwise I feel the documentation / main site should be kept as neutral as possible. I wanted to chime in here: The idea that Brion expressed, I believe, is what we were going for with the public RFP for the MW Release Management work. It showed community support and something to point at (by anyone) if a weird decision was made (or interpreted as such). So, maybe the default install doc shouldn't say Step 1: Create account at $Prefered_Vendor but we can definitely have known good vendors listed somewhere... (just my personal opinion, not that my professional one should be taken as anymore more than that either, really) Greg -- | Greg GrossmeierGPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E | | identi.ca: @gregA18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D | ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On 10/01/2013 11:11 AM, Brion Vibber wrote: Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? I'd say agree the best approach first with folks like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hosting_services There are many small companies trying to make a living out of (among other things) MediaWiki hosting and expertise. If we are missing players more involved with the community then we could start knocking those doors rather than triying to build an own house and call it official. PS: I'm maintaining my own instance at gandi.net simple hosting and surely I would like to have a specialized host not billing me as a company. They would have latest stable MediaWiki available + a bunch of tested extensions. I should only take care of my LocalSettings.php and whatever unsupported extensions I decide to have). -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
So, maybe the default install doc shouldn't say Step 1: Create account at $Prefered_Vendor but we can definitely have known good vendors listed somewhere... Greg Yes, hosts give very little information up front. You have to try them out to find out what software they have installed. The money is nothing, but spending days trying to make crap work is much more of a loss. I'd like the name of a few hosts where Lua can be make to work without a big struggle. Fred ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Greg Grossmeier g...@wikimedia.org wrote: The idea that Brion expressed, I believe, is what we were going for with the public RFP for the MW Release Management work. It showed community support and something to point at (by anyone) if a weird decision was made (or interpreted as such). Yes -- by no means am I recommending that I or WMF simply crown a preferred vendor by fiat! We would definitely want to go through a similar process; in fact that RFP was one of the things that inspired me to start thinking about hosting support needs over the summer. So, maybe the default install doc shouldn't say Step 1: Create account at $Prefered_Vendor but we can definitely have known good vendors listed somewhere... Yes; we certainly shouldn't discourage self-hosting or other hosting. What I mainly want us to accomplish is to make sure that end-users have a safe, up-to-date, fast path to setting up their own wiki, with the support they'll need to grow it or move it to self-hosting when they need it. This is more about the how (what we can accomplish for our users) than about who provides the services. That could just as easily be a group of recommended hosting services and a confederation of independent consultants rather than a standalone company. -- brion ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Quim Gil q...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 10/01/2013 11:11 AM, Brion Vibber wrote: Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? I'd say agree the best approach first with folks like https://www.mediawiki.org/**wiki/Hosting_serviceshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hosting_services There are many small companies trying to make a living out of (among other things) MediaWiki hosting and expertise. If we are missing players more involved with the community then we could start knocking those doors rather than triying to build an own house and call it official. Can I just say: they're all dinky and antiquated and none of them come close to offering the kind of deployment and configuration experience that I expect a modern platform to have. I don't like this every time you have a new idea, God kills a Community member approach. It'd be more productive to think about the role the Foundation could play in ensuring that MediaWiki exposes the right set of interfaces for deep integration with configuration management and cloud provisioning platforms, and ensuring that these interfaces are intuitive and well-documented. This might actually spur some innovation. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
MediaWiki exposes the right set of interfaces for deep integration with configuration management and cloud provisioning platforms, and ensuring that these interfaces are intuitive and well-documented. Not well documented yet; but I'll put in a shameless plug that I have a patch [1] that will expose the git treeish information of extensions via the API if anyone wants to review :D [1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/65299/ ~Matt Walker Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising Technology Team On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Ori Livneh o...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Quim Gil q...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 10/01/2013 11:11 AM, Brion Vibber wrote: Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? I'd say agree the best approach first with folks like https://www.mediawiki.org/**wiki/Hosting_services https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hosting_services There are many small companies trying to make a living out of (among other things) MediaWiki hosting and expertise. If we are missing players more involved with the community then we could start knocking those doors rather than triying to build an own house and call it official. Can I just say: they're all dinky and antiquated and none of them come close to offering the kind of deployment and configuration experience that I expect a modern platform to have. I don't like this every time you have a new idea, God kills a Community member approach. It'd be more productive to think about the role the Foundation could play in ensuring that MediaWiki exposes the right set of interfaces for deep integration with configuration management and cloud provisioning platforms, and ensuring that these interfaces are intuitive and well-documented. This might actually spur some innovation. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Ori Livneh o...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Quim Gil q...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 10/01/2013 11:11 AM, Brion Vibber wrote: Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? I'd say agree the best approach first with folks like https://www.mediawiki.org/**wiki/Hosting_serviceshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hosting_services There are many small companies trying to make a living out of (among other things) MediaWiki hosting and expertise. If we are missing players more involved with the community then we could start knocking those doors rather than triying to build an own house and call it official. Can I just say: they're all dinky and antiquated and none of them come close to offering the kind of deployment and configuration experience that I expect a modern platform to have. I don't like this every time you have a new idea, God kills a Community member approach. It'd be more productive to think about the role the Foundation could play in ensuring that MediaWiki exposes the right set of interfaces for deep integration with configuration management and cloud provisioning platforms, and ensuring that these interfaces are intuitive and well-documented. This might actually spur some innovation. Other ideas for community engagement: * Find out what version of MediaWiki each of these hosts is offering and nag the ones that lag behind to upgrade. * Find out which extensions (and which versions) each host is offering and lobby for the inclusion of new extensions. * Find out whether the management interface provided by the host describes MediaWiki in a manner that is compelling and accurate, and which concisely articulates MediaWiki's positioning relative to other wiki and content-management systems. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
Wikia is dinky? ShoutWiki is antiquated? I don't necessarily disagree with your overall point, but please don't generalise like this; an innacurate statement like that just takes away from it. On 01/10/13 21:34, Ori Livneh wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Quim Gil q...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 10/01/2013 11:11 AM, Brion Vibber wrote: Question for the group: Would an officially supported general-purpose MediaWiki hosting service be useful to people who would like to run wikis, but don't have the time, expertise, or resources to maintain their own installation? If so, what can we (as interested parties in MediaWiki development and use) do to make this happen? I'd say agree the best approach first with folks like https://www.mediawiki.org/**wiki/Hosting_serviceshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hosting_services There are many small companies trying to make a living out of (among other things) MediaWiki hosting and expertise. If we are missing players more involved with the community then we could start knocking those doors rather than triying to build an own house and call it official. Can I just say: they're all dinky and antiquated and none of them come close to offering the kind of deployment and configuration experience that I expect a modern platform to have. I don't like this every time you have a new idea, God kills a Community member approach. It'd be more productive to think about the role the Foundation could play in ensuring that MediaWiki exposes the right set of interfaces for deep integration with configuration management and cloud provisioning platforms, and ensuring that these interfaces are intuitive and well-documented. This might actually spur some innovation. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Isarra Yos zhoris...@gmail.com wrote: Wikia is dinky? ShoutWiki is antiquated? I don't necessarily disagree with your overall point, but please don't generalise like this; an innacurate statement like that just takes away from it. Ok, fair point. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Ori Livneh o...@wikimedia.org wrote: Foundation could play in ensuring that MediaWiki exposes the right set of interfaces for deep integration with configuration management and cloud provisioning platforms, and ensuring that these interfaces are intuitive and well-documented. This might actually spur some innovation. Puppet, chef, salt stack, cfengine, CloudFormation, OpenStack, etc? Hmm... THIS. Yes. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
