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  • From: Reid Priedhorsky <reid AT reidster.net>
  • To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l AT lists.wikimedia.org>, acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Cc: Danese Cooper <dcooper AT wikimedia.org>, Erik Moeller <erik AT wikimedia.org>, payers AT wikimedia.org
  • Subject: [acawiki-general] Action plan for AcaWiki hosting change (was: Proposal: new hosting for AcaWiki)
  • Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:33:26 -0400

Hi folks,

I've been on vacation for the past couple of weeks, so here is a catch-all response to the apparent list activity while I've been gone. I have *not* edited the CC list - sorry for any duplicates.

* I agree that a medium- to long-term goal of being folded into WMF is an excellent one, and that the short-term strategy of transitioning from Creative Commons hosting to a dedicated MediaWiki provider is the best path to that goal.

* I do think that Semantic MediaWiki rather than plain MediaWiki is very important because of the type of use researchers are interested in; e.g., we need to be able to do searches like "author = X" and get citations where the author is X rather than all citations containing X anywhere in the summary. My understanding is that SMW can do this but MW cannot. Thus, IMO, waiting longer for WMF migration in order to continue to use SMW is the better choice.

* I am not very interested in being early-stage tester for an immature hosting structure - having reliable hosting is much more important to me (and, I claim, most researchers) than speeding development of WMF labs infrastructure, particularly if WMF already has a development plan that they're happy with. However, if WMF really needs the testing, I am happy to have that discussion.

* Regarding Referata vs. Fabricatorz, my take is that Referata would be preferable because they are a dedicated SMW host while Fabricatorz appears not to be. Referata would be shared hosting, but IMO that's fine.

Given all that, I propose to do the following. And by propose, I mean "I will start doing this unless people complain". :)

1. Open a free account at Referata, which gets us acawiki.referata.com.
2. Work with AcaWiki people to get an importable dump, containing existing AcaWiki accounts, taking appropriate steps to ensure privacy of account holders.
3. Import that into acawiki.referata.com
4. Have the community prod/test the new site; iterate until we have consensus that moving to Referata is right and the migration went OK.
5. Work with AcaWiki people to redirect the acawiki.org domain name, figure out the financials, and make the final cut-over.

No data would be lost in the transition - people will still be able to log in using existing accounts, and all history will be preserved. The only change people not paying attention to this discussion would notice is some period of read-only and a change in skin.

So the basic steps are: (a) change hosts, (b) become even more awesome, and (c) get "bought out" by WMF.

Please reply if anything above seems like a bad idea, if I've missed anything, or if you have any other thoughts. I'll start doing stuff within a few days unless there are objections or people want to discuss further.

Reid

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