History:Wiki Migration

From MusicBrainz Wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search

Migration Complete

If you find any problems with the migration:

  • Check the bugs list
  • Consult the usual sources of help.

Thanks!

Plan for Migration to MediaWiki

Thinking aloud...

  • Checkmark.png Fix up skins on mw2
  • Checkmark.png Configure uploads
  • Checkmark.png Document the setup on syswiki
  • Checkmark.png DNS
  • Checkmark.png Make sure that moin responds to "oldwiki.musicbrainz.org"
  • Checkmark.png Pick a date/time, and announce it via the blog

at the time:

  • Checkmark.png set moin to read only
  • Checkmark.png change wikidocs to fetch from "oldwiki"
  • Checkmark.png re-import everything from moin to mediawiki
  • Checkmark.png change "wiki.musicbrainz.org" to point to mediawiki
  • Checkmark.png post an update to the blog

and over time:


Previous Migration from UseMod to MoinMoin

The rest of this page is historical. It explains how the Wiki was ported from UseMod to MoinMoin Wiki in July 2005, in accordance with the WikiDocsConcept.

The tool used for this saves the ported pages under the username WikiMigrationBot.

The Aim

The aim of the migration is to get the WikiDocs in a form where the WikiDocsConcept and http://wikidocs.musicbrainz.org/write/NewSiteStructure can be implemented. So:

Issues

  • There still a few ImmutablePages that need fixing or deleting. For example, the page MoinMoin links to some pages that were deleted.

The Plan

The migration plan for the wiki is as follows:

  • Announce to the MailingLists that the wiki will be ported at a certain time, and won't be editable for (say) 2 hours.
  • Make the usemod wiki read-only.
  • JohnCarter runs the WikiMigrationBot script to port the bulk of the pages. There's a known bug which means a small number of pages don't get created (expected to be <10), they can port these semi-automatically (by manually copy-pasting the script's output).
  • Do a quick sanity check of the ported pages
  • Move the moinmoin wiki to wiki.musicbrainz.org (and move the usemod wiki to say, oldwiki.musicbrainz.org, just in case it's needed).
    • Is it possible to set up a redirect so links to "wiki.musicbrainz.org/wiki.pl?SomeWikiPage" get redirected to "wiki.musicbrainz.org/SomeWikiPage" ? That way existing links (eg in mod notes) won't break.


Draft Announcement Email

(JohnCarter will email this to mb-users, mb-experts, mb-announce and mb-dev before the wiki is ported).

As some of you might already have heard, we will be changing our wiki enigine software from UseMod to MoinMoin. This migration is now scheduled for

<date and time>.

The wiki (http://wiki.musicbrainz.org) will be read-only for a few hours.

During this time, a script will port all of the content from the old to the new wiki engine. When the port is complete, the old UseMod wiki will be parked to oldwiki.musicbrainz.org, and we can get stuck into the new improved wiki.

Why

We're making the move because MoinMoin has various features that will allow us to integrate the editable wiki into the documentation on the main site. Indeed, the plan is that virtually all of the static documentation will be replaced by a read-only shadow of selected pages from the wiki. This will present the useful information from the wiki in a user-friendly form. See http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/wiki.pl?WikiDocs for details.

Changes

Wiki users will notice some changes when we start using MoinMoin.

MoinMoin is also stricter about the syntax that is allowed. For one thing, links or images are not allowed in titles. Unfortunately, we're currently doing this on a lot of pages.

Please Help!

Pages with syntax that MoinMoin doesn't allow have to be tidied up by hand, but the script does help. All pages that need manual fix-up link to the WikiMigrationBotReport page. Thus following the backlinks from this page (by clicking on the title) will give a list of pages that need work. There are about 160 of such pages that need manual fixing. Compare this to 63 people that registered themselves with apage, this means that if only half of us clean up five pages, then the new wiki will be in prfect shape in a very short time.

Please take some time and fix a few pages. The first thing you should do is register yourself with your old WikiName. This will allow MoinMoin to do backups of your changes and better resolve edit conflicts (if more than one person is working on a page).

Other than the syntax difference, the wiki should be treated the same as before - it's a resource for everyone to edit. If there's something in the documentation you don't understand, please add your question to the relevant page. If you see a question to which you know the answer, go ahead and answer it! If all the experienced MusicBrainz users spend a few minutes working on the wiki now and again, we'll quickly have some amazing documentation.


Future Work

The following FutureWork I'm not 100% clear on, but it's not part of the initial porting job, so that doesn't matter right now:

Discussion

Questions:

  • Should all pages already in the wikidocs be marked static?
  • How are we going to mark which pages are static? My idea for this is as follows:
    • Priviledged users can release a page to the ModeratedWikiMirror.
    • A specific version of a page is released - MoinMoin primarily uses datestamps instead of version numbers, so maybe we use that.
    • Subsequent edits to the page by unpriviledged users don't appear on the ShadowWiki until the page is marked as Good by a priviledged user.
    • The big question: How do we implement this?
  • Unless I'm missing something, there's no easy link on the wiki back to the main site. Also, perhaps it would be nice if the wiki was more integrated in the main site, like always having the main site's side bar visible. --mfmeulenbelt
Retrieved from "https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/index.php?title=History:Wiki_Migration&oldid=49933"