At last Wednesday's meeting I volunteered to be the Wiki Poobah, and lead a cleanup/reorg/complete tearout of the current wiki. So I'm looking for some input...

• What's there that you want to keep? Let me know which articles you want to have moved over to the new wiki.
• How should it be organized? I think it would be good to have some broad categories to make discovery easier.
• How hard should it be secured? Obviously it should be editable by members only; the big question is how hard we bolt down registration, and do we need to be able to adjust security on individual pages.
• Most importantly, does anyone feel strongly that we should keep MediaWiki as the engine? I'm leaning toward replacing it with DokuWiki. I've been working with it a bit this week on my laptop; I'll have it with me tomorrow night if anyone wants to have a look.

Thanks in advance for your input!

The 3D prototyper CNC Cyberoptics thing would be good to keep.

It would be nice to have broad categories and tags that are category agnostic, so things that are common to lathes can be found from either say the woodworking or metalworking categories.

Mediawiki isn't bad we just don't have it setup terribly well. I'm partial TiddlyWiki which is a more personal wiki generally, though I've setup a hosted one. What I'd like is the ability to sync a wiki entry. TiddlyWiki has the ability to update some other Wikis.

Security wise, SSO with the forum would be great. I'm not sure beyond that, an ability to share files either with all users or selected users would be very useful.

I'm not familiar with DokuWiki, but I'll check it out.

Thanks for taking one for the team and working on this.

Pete

I was one of the original pushers for the wiki. It started off ok, then the effort in/gain out equation went down hill (and then I moved).

One of the initial ideas I had was to make it a resource of places to find things in the Metro area. Example. But at one point it looks like the extensions used disappeared and the pages became unusable. They are no longer linked from the front end. Verdict: Drop it.

There almost no links from the main page deeper into the wiki. Even the meetings page links out to Google Docs. I'd guess there isn't much over there to really port over to a new wiki except the content of the font page. Maybe some projects i'm missing?

I'd say your wiki engine choice depends somewhat on the security question. Determining what level of control is needed might limit options.

I liked the idea of the store / sources pages, I think each group of tools should have it's own header page and each tool after that have a page (major tool, and complicated minor tool)

I think projects would also do well to have pages, maybe not individual projects, unless they are complex, but things like the Drawers for storage, or computer builds for lab PC's. (I used to use Wiki to track lab machines, work done, updated patches, new OS builds in Ghost etc., and think key machines need this level of detail, while a generic lab machine may not.)

I also think the Wiki is a great place for the Hall of Fame and Hall of things that did not quite go right (no shame, it is a learning experience)

Lastly, and this is what the old WIki needed badly, is a way to see other information/pages at a glance. It takes a bit of work to do this with a Wiki, but even a static page with subjects index, or topics created would have been helpful.

TiddlyWiki?!
Its a cute toy for individual use, but doesn't it rapidly turn into a huge pig? There's NO backend. It's all client-side in javascript.
The entire Wiki is one huge file. I can't imagine that scaling very well.

One thing I find mildly annoying about the Wiki, the Blog, and the Forum is that I need a different login for each of them. I understand that combining these is a huge can of worms, but if there's anything we can do now to remove a few worms from said can, it may bear considering.

On the Wiki: Might it be useful to have areas with different levels of access? F'rinstance: An area where boardmembers have write access, all others are read-only. Maybe a members-only area where guests can't go at all.

Are there any themes from other hackerspace wikis that you'd like to roll in?

Take a bit to visit some other wikis and just hit the random page button for a while to get a feel for what they offer.

In it's basic form all true, there are back ends that can host it, but it's not ideal for a big environment, the results as I'm typing search terms really kicks ass though. Mostly it would be nice to be able to sync my entries from TiddlyWiki to the main Wiki.

Which brings me to, I'd like to start documenting several things, what's the story on the new Wiki, is an instance running somewhere, is it going to be weeks / months ? I can certainly spin up my own and reference it, but that's kind of silly.

How about a progress update?

Thanks

Pete

I've got DokuWiki loaded on my lappy. Some of the content from the existing wiki has been moved over, thanks to the nifty MediaWiki to DokuWiki Converter Google revealed. I've got the vector theme loaded, so the look and feel is very close to the current Wikipedia:



I even managed to get syntax highlighting for Arduino code working:



At this point, I need FTP/SFTP access to the hosting server, along with info on how PHP is set up there. DokuWiki doesn't use a database, so I don't need access there, though it would be good to get a dump of the MediaWiki DB before it goes away.

Excellent, I checked out dokuwiki, and it looks like it should work well. It can integrate with the forum's login and has a bagillion plugins. Any plans to install the RPC API plugin? That one looked like it had interesting automation potential.

Pete

I'll have to take a look at that one. I'm up for loading any plugins that people find useful (as long as they don't make the wiki all 'splodey).