On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Ian Clarke <ian at locut.us> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Evan Daniel <evanbd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> You know, you could have brought this up when we were discussing
>> moving the wiki.
>
> No I couldn't, because at the time I didn't know that their wiki hosting was
> so badly designed because I hadn't personally tried it.

You could have tried it at the time.  SF allows users (not just
projects) to set up copies of any of their hosted apps.  It's quite
easy; it literally took longer for me to find my old login and
password info than to set up a copy of MediaWiki.

>
>>
>> ?Or you could suggest an alternative Mediawiki host;
>
> I could, except I'm not familiar with Mediawiki nor the hosting options for
> it - I took people's word for it that it would be an improvement on what we
> have now.

>From a usability standpoint, it's a *vast* improvement.  The big
features it adds, for me, are viable spam management, categories,
templates, and markup that most of our potential authors already know.

>
>>
>> you shouldn't have much trouble moving the wiki, since SF provides
>> convenient backups / exports. ?I don't think anyone is particularly
>> committed to SF, we were just tired of standing around bitching
>> instead of actually working on it. ?If you want to wait around for the
>> perfect solution to the wiki hosting problem to appear, don't let
>> those of us working on writing stuff for it get in your way.
>
> Can't we discuss the fact that the proposed new wiki appears to be unusable,
> without you getting mad at me? ?Its not my fault that SF's usability sucks.

Sure.  For starters, it does not appear unusable to me.  It's a little
slow, and there are some odd default permissions that I'm not yet sure
how to correct, but I still find it to be an improvement.

There are two independent issues, here: converting to MediaWiki, and
hosting the wiki.  I got tired of waiting on the latter to start on
the former.  I'm serious about moving the wiki: it should be easy, and
I would have no objections.

>
>>
>> You don't particularly sound like you want help solving this problem,
>> but I might as well ask: did you actually succeed at logging in to the
>> SF site?
>
> I'm not really concerned about myself, I'm more concerned about that fact
> that the new wiki appears unviewable (since I assume I'm not the only person
> having problems with it).
> As it stands, an unviewable wiki is far worse than what we already have at
> wiki.freenetproject.org.
> Tell me I'm wrong, but don't get mad at me simply for making an observation.

I'm not telling you you're wrong; I'm sure you really did have trouble
logging in.  A simple observation would have been something along the
lines of "My OpenID login doesn't work; this makes the wiki unviewable
for me, which is obviously bad."  Your post was not that.  And so far,
this is the first I've heard about your problem.  Can you log in to SF
at all, or is it just a wiki problem?  Have you followed the steps
bback suggested?

What I got mad about was that you were complaining about a solution to
a problem (the current wiki being badly organized, spammed, and
basically unmaintained), without offering anything that could remotely
be construed as a constructive suggestion.  IMHO the wiki migration is
not the first case where Freenet work has stalled waiting for a
consensus that will not appear about some decision.  Attacking
proposed solutions, especially ones people are already working on, is
a way to make that happen more often, not less.  Frequently, an
imperfect decision is better than no decision, and in many cases
(including this one), fixing that decision later is easy enough and
doesn't even waste the interim work.  I view the wiki migration
process in the context of WP:BOLD (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold ); rather than spending
a lot of time figuring out how to best solve the problem, infinity0
and I simply started solving it.

Evan Daniel

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