Re: wiki upgrade

[Ivan Vučica]

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 11:53 PM, Svetlana Tkachenko
<svetlana@members.fsf.org> wrote:
> Could we upgrade wiki.gnustep.org from mediawiki 1.5.1 (2005) to 1.28.2
> (2017)? Who has shell access to it?

I'm not sure who hosts our wiki infrastructure or the website. +Adam
and Greg explicitly, for visibility.

> Then the wiki would have an API, I would be able to get a list of app
> names and download links. I would like to download all apps to my
> computer to get translation statistics and to add translations.

API is probably the least of the reasons to upgrade 2005-era web
software. (You can screenscrape the wiki.)

~3min of poking around also revealed a trivial way to fetch the raw
contents of a page:
  http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php?title=GNUstep_under_Ubuntu_Linux&action=raw

This doesn't help much for Category:* pages, but you can still
screenscrape the HTML page.

That being said... If you're willing to spend time processing the
wiki, would you consider contributing by converting the wiki to
Markdown?

My reasoning is as follows. We don't really need MediaWiki as such.
Having the wiki content in Git+Markdown would allow us to depend less
on a particular piece of software, and focus on the content itself.
I'd be in favor of shutdown of wiki as such. We could avoid breaking
the links by redirecting to whatever new contraption we put in place
instead of it. (There are a variety of static and dynamic Markdown
renderers; surely we can find one that would fit our needs.)

One of the advantages is the ability to locally keep a copy of the
entire wiki in a trivial fashion.