MediaWiki for ArchLinux?

cactus · 2005-06-05 03:45:31

I have been fiddling with mediawiki for a bit, and I think it might make a suitable replacement for the ailing phpwiki install that Arch is currently using.

I have done a bit of work on a theme for it even. Just edited some css. Here is what I have so far..

Test Site
Of course, I am by no means much of a graphical design man. But, the color scheme seems reasonable. The logo I put in there seems a bit out of place, but a suitable arch logo could easily be dropped in there.

Dusty · 2005-06-05 03:47:10

get shadowhand to do the graphics...

you gonna apply for the documentor position?

Dusty

iBertus · 2005-06-05 03:51:57

that looks pretty good, cactus! much better than the current wiki setup.

celeron2002 · 2005-06-05 06:08:48

it looks very nice, even better than wikipedia 8)

medicated · 2005-06-05 06:24:42

Well..it looks a lot better than the current wiki, and from what I've read about mediawiki, its got a lot more oomph than what we're currently running. It'd be nice if we could have a wiki with the same appeal as gentoo-wiki. There's a lot more to it than just asthetics though. I think media-wiki is a great idea for our wiki needs.

CyberTron · 2005-06-05 09:35:20

i too find this new *proposed* wiki to have a far superior feel/look to it..than the one up and running...

my vote is for mediawiki

dp · 2005-06-05 11:19:48

mediawiki for arch? not a bad idea!

Dusty · 2005-06-05 15:48:14

What happened to SolarWiki?

With the recent spam reports, I think somebody needs to work on transferring to a new wiki ASAP... I'm not volunteering for this, but somebody should e-mail Judd and talk about setting it up...

If a new wiki is set up, I *will* volunteer to help transfer content over. Does mediaWiki use a totally different syntax from phpwiki?

Dusty

z4ziggy · 2005-06-05 16:47:57

about time we step into the mediawiki era... more power to you Cactus.

RIP SolarWiki...

cactus · 2005-06-05 19:08:46

Does mediaWiki use a totally different syntax from phpwiki?

A bit different, I believe. I have been looking at some documentation about converting from one format to another, so all hope is not lost.

cactus · 2005-06-05 23:52:39

Well, there are about 424 wikipages in the current phpwiki.
The wikitext conversion is not going super great. I managed to export the wikitext data, change the filenames to remove urlencodes, and spaces and such, and there is a start on a sed file to do some simple replacements.

Most of the info I got from here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Document … conversion

Of the 424 pages, some are user pages. Those would likely be tossed, and people would need to recreate them in the new system.
There are also a few dupe pages, and nonsense pages.

Considerable handholding would be required to transition the data from there to any new wiki chosen. Formatting issues, fixing rendering, modifying page names to make more sense, etc. It would not be an easy job by any means.

I think manual creation of each page would be better than trying to automate much further than I have done (a little bit better phpwiki to mediawiki conversion would be good), to help ensure documentation quality.

It would not be an easy job, creating some 400 or so pages by hand. Copying text and making sure it was legible and reasonable. Still, given a few people, it shouldn't be too bad a chore..

Dusty · 2005-06-06 00:03:02

It will be a good opportuinity to prune some of the old faq pages and such too

dtw · 2005-06-06 05:34:55

i think it would be good idea to straight request people like phrakture and myself to recreate our own pages - gives us an easy opportunity to learn about the wiki formatting too

When we were discussing this a while back i thought Mediawiki would be a good choice but rasat had concerns about the syntax.

Just to clarify:

It'd be nice if we could have a wiki with the same appeal as gentoo-wiki.

They already run mediawiki don't they? It does look good

iBertus · 2005-06-06 05:47:49

dibblethewrecker wrote:

They already run mediawiki don't they?

Yep, I see a mediawiki logo at the bottom right of the page.

elasticdog · 2005-06-06 06:30:08

I'd be more than happy to volunteer some time to get the wiki (new or old) into shape. I think organization is something that can be tackled a bit better, and the consistency between pages as well. There are many ideas that can be borrowed from Wikis such as Gentoos, in the way of their Getting Started section which gives ideas on how to properly add pages, gives a style guide and naming conventions, etc.

phrakture · 2005-06-06 15:45:01

Yeah I'd volunteer too - actually there's not *that much* data in the wiki - I would be completely fine with "hey, phrakture, copy and paste everything from the wiki"

then I could reformat it later.....

medicated · 2005-06-06 16:01:32

I'm looking for a way to get more involved in the Arch community, so maybe helping out in this transition stage is a good way to start. If there's anything I can do to help out, let me know. I'm going to go about a local media-wiki installation and play around with it.

cactus · 2005-06-06 18:43:49

medicated wrote:

I'm going to go about a local media-wiki installation and play around with it.

If you have any questions, let me know. I have got it installed, running, and have started fiddling with obscure config variables..

Mith · 2005-06-07 19:59:27

I'd help to moving stuff back and forth. essentially it's nothing more than copy and paste and maybe polish up the look for readability, right?

is anyone going to coordinate that?

dtw · 2005-06-08 09:39:59

suggestions for a wiki move coordinator?

dtw · 2005-06-08 10:20:38

cactus - can i play on your demo, is it online or local?

whisky · 2005-06-08 15:16:51

Actually we here are planning to make a mirror of Arch wiki, and translate it to Traditional Chinese entirely. We used at first the media wiki, and trust me, it is really a pain in the axx to make the page having the same layout as they are in Arch Wiki. Syntax are just incompatible.

A single copy/paste with a little conversion of syntax just wont work correctly - if Arch wants to use media wiki, I suggest you guys to be familiar with mediawiki's syntax first.

phpwiki has the simplicity and Mediawiki is really really powerful. And there is a gap to step over if you want to use mediawiki to replace phpwiki..

dtw · 2005-06-08 15:21:31

that definitely the big issue here - is it easier to use mediawiki for traditional Chinese and other translations tho?

whisky · 2005-06-08 18:47:57

MediaWiki has the advantage to be completly UTF-8 compatible, and I think it is quite suitable for all kind of language (charset)

But the lastest phpwiki has also a limited unicode compatibility (need to setup the server - apache, mysql, php to use utf-8 as default charset - and not use other than Latin alphabets as Documents' name) .

So, to respond quickly to our needs, we are now using phpwiki (with its limitation in unicode support) and this leaves us to focus our effort on the translation itself and no more extra effort on converting / re-organizing the page and its layout.

you can see the result at

http://arch.linux.org.tw/wiki/

for the media wiki version - no more update now

and

http://arch.linux.org.tw/phpwiki/
for the phpwiki one

As you can see, my main concern is not which wiki is better or easier to be used, but how to convert it and make the translation effortless...

cactus · 2005-06-08 22:12:08

I am really loving the mediawiki namespaces, and automatic categorization with template includes.
It is pretty darn slick.

Example

Arch Linux

#1 2005-06-05 03:45:31

MediaWiki for ArchLinux?

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Re: MediaWiki for ArchLinux?

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Re: MediaWiki for ArchLinux?

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