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Strife Onizuka

By Strife Onizuka,
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Strife Onizuka

Strife Onizuka

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About a month ago LL locked down the wiki, locking the LSL Portal as a side effect, my understanding is that it was because of hacking.

If the wiki isn't unlocked soon, we will need to consider if keeping the LSL Portal on the SecondLife Wiki is really serving the communities needs or not. With that in mind we should consider migrating the content elsewhere.

This is the time to also discuss and put forward proposals redoing the layout/design goals. Fortunately we can take the content with us this time. This time around we can actually do this, the content is cc-by-sa. For those unfamiliar with the history, the lsl documentation has moved several times. This isn't the first time LL's wiki stewardship has left us high and dry.

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Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

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Strife Onizuka wrote:

About a month ago LL locked down the wiki, locking the LSL Portal as a side effect, my understanding is that it was because of hacking.

 

If the wiki isn't unlocked soon, we will need to consider if keeping the LSL Portal on the SecondLife Wiki is really serving the communities needs or not. With that in mind we should consider migrating the content elsewhere.

 

This is the time to also discuss and put forward proposals redoing the layout/design goals. Fortunately we can take the content with us this time. This time around we can actually do this, the content is cc-by-sa. For those unfamiliar with the history, the lsl documentation has moved several times. This isn't the first time LL's wiki stewardship has left us high and dry.

The Lab's silence on this is deafening.

Is it a policy decision or something else?

We've all relied on the Wiki for years.

There are JIRA's for anyone who wants to add their voice.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-7781?

See also:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Second-Life-Tech/I-cannot-edit-my-SL-wiki-user-page/m-p/2842030

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Rolig Loon

Rolig Loon

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It was actually more than a month ago that I discovered I could not edit -- late August or early September, I think.  It's my understanding too that LL is hoping to be able to unlock it "soon", but what that means is anyone's guess.  Having watched the wiki and other archival information suffer through changes in service over the years, I am nervous when I see something like this happen again.  Moving wiki contents elsewhere, of course, carries its own risks and means that someone -- you, Strife? -- will have to spend even more time on routine housekeeping.  I'm not sure how to tell whether moving the wiki is a good idea or not.

Redesigning the Portal's contents and layout is another matter, though.  You have made some excellent changes over the past year (and much longer), so the Portal is cleaner and more internally consistent than it was.  It's not easy to find the right balance between technical tightness and newbie-friendliness, but I think it will be hard to improve on what we have, other than by slowly adding more illustrative examples and perhaps some in-depth sections like the current pages on rotations and lists. 

Whatever happens, thank you for continuing to take on the stewardship of the Portal, Strife. It's an invaluable resource.

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Harper Held

Harper Held

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Hello.

I just found this thread on twitter and started a thread on sluniverse for this topic in the general section.

 

LL has a history of removing posts that they don't like it and its' my opinion that slu is a safer place to discuss anything that might be even remotely critical of LL. [EDIT TO ADD] that includes technical or policy decisions or information that they do not want discussed or put out.

 

My first thought is to itemize and think of what y'all want to preserve, then make mirror copies of that information over on wikia (which has an excellent, if dated, SL wiki already). I'm not sure that wikia is a permanent solution, but it would be a good (modifyable) stopgap to use while organising and planning out what you want to do.

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Strife Onizuka

Strife Onizuka

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What steps would be involved in the migration?

 

1) A server with CPU time and bandwidth to spare.

2) Someone to maintain it and install software.

3) For us to decide what we want. (See proposals)

 

I'll post some proposals tomorrow. Basically there are a bunch of tradeoffs and maybe no good solutions, just ok solutions. There are a bunch of things behind the scenes we do poorly. If we go our own way, we could fix them.

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Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

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Strife Onizuka wrote:

Alexa was categorizing the issue into the hiarchy (mobile spell check sucks). It basically means a Linden spent about 10 seconds looking at and thinking about the issue. From the perspective of if this helps or hurts the prospects, it is neutral.

Well somewhere there is a Linden who knows what is going on.  At least I hope there is.  The only thing I've heard is a rumour there is some type of security problem with the Wiki and that is the reason it is closed to editing.**

But on the otherside of this Linden's tell us nothing happens without a JIRA, that they use JIRA to keep track of their work flow, etc.  So I started one.

I hate to sugest this but maybe we need to go to the top and bug Ebbe about it.

To us the Wiki is very important.  LL may not consider it as important as we do so it's not a priority.  They did try to migrate some things to the Knowledge Base but even that is very poorly maintained.

 

**There are pages in the Wiki that are "Linden Lab Official."  Those pages are legal documents dealing with official policies.  We do understand that LL can't afford to have anyone messing with those and that would take prioeity over anything we may want.

 

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Strife Onizuka

Strife Onizuka

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Wiki Documentation Technical Description

  1. We use a number of mediawiki extensions to expand mediawikis template language into being a turing-complete programming language.
  2. LL has not kept these extensions up to date.
  3. Layout is managed and driven by templates.
  4. Some of the templates are more than just lightweight scripts, they are more like programs.
  5. We use templates to inject centralized content into articles.
  6. We use inline CSS to work around not being able to edit the site CSS.

#6 is easy to fix, we could use the CSS extension or just allow certain admins to edit it. This is the low hanging fruit.
#4 & #5 If we are to make use of the raw wikitext (as opposed to the rendered wikitext), we have to maintain it as it is now or we loose #5. The implementation can change but the interface needs to stay more or less the same.
#5 A better solution to this might be Semantic MediaWiki (a fork of MediaWiki), this is something to look into. People really don't like that content is hidden away in templates, SMW *might* resolve some of this.
#3 Like #5, people don't like having to learn template interfaces. They are non-obvious. This could be addressed by a wysiwyg, or wizard based editor. A wizard might necessitate using an entirely different wiki engine. It might be possible to work a wizard into the MediaWiki editor. This would be well worth the effort to implement.
#2 Updating the extensions may break EVERYTHING. I'm not actually worried about this. It just means going through and fixing all the templates. Regardless of what we do, we will need to fix the templates.
#1 Since it's interpreted and not compiled, it is SLOW. MediaWiki within the last few years added a new template language that *should* reduce this problem. LL never installed it. We would benefit from using it. This of course requires rewriting the templates to use it.
So to summarize the options:

  • If we stick with MediaWiki it won't be a smooth transition.
  • Once we get an up to date version of MediaWiki working, things should work better.
  • If we move to a different flavor of MediaWiki it might improve the editing experience.
  • If we move to a different or custom wiki engine we could really improve the editing experience at the cost of having to write our own wiki engine, or adapt someone elses.
  • If we choose an infrequently used Wiki engine or write our own we open ourselves up to being hacked. Web security is HARD to get right and sticking with a popular wiki engine means we will get security updates, etc without necessarily being hacked first. The same goes for wiki extensions.

To summarize the summary:

  • The transition will be bumpy. It may involve a bunch of work for whoever does it.

I will look into the popular MediaWiki forks. I think we should probably wait until December before making a decission and then not do a move until January. I would really like it if LL just reopened the wik.

 

o_O does linking to SLU get your post deleted automagically? WTF? That is NOT COOL!

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Rolig Loon

Rolig Loon

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Strife Onizuka wrote:

[ .... ]

o_O does linking to SLU get your post deleted automagically? WTF? That is NOT COOL!

 Quite possibly.  I posted a link here to your SLU post yesterday, and it poofed instantly. I decided that anyone who really wanted to read the same thing twice could probably find it without my help, so I didn't bother trying a second time.

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Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

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Rolig Loon wrote:

Strife Onizuka wrote:

[ .... ]

o_O does linking to SLU get your post deleted automagically? WTF? That is NOT COOL!

 Quite possibly.  I posted a link here to your SLU post yesterday, and it poofed instantly. I decided that anyone who really wanted to read the same thing twice could probably find it without my help, so I didn't bother trying a second time.

It's hit and miss.  Technically we aren't supposed to link to "non SL" sites.  Sometimes in application it makes no sense. 

To be specific, under the heading of SPAM, the Community Guidlines state:

"Do not reference other websites offering any product or service."

Also, we are not supposed to publicly question moderation here.

It's a complete head scratcher.

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Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

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ObviousAltIsObvious wrote:

Strife Onizuka wrote:

o_O does linking to SLU get your post deleted automagically? WTF? That is NOT COOL!

A hyperactive spam filter does make more sense than a hyperactive Moderator.

When a Moderator censors us we are supposed to receive a Private Message so we can amend the errors of our ways.

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ktucky

ktucky

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and so...in the meantime a fierce and cheating competitor to the company i work for has added a "regulatory warning " phrase after our companies offerings  - a false disclaimer that slants the light on our company to look  badly. and I am hearing here there is not a thing we can do to remove the slanderous content added to the wiki by  this person ???!!!!!

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Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

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ktucky wrote:

and so...in the meantime a fierce and cheating competitor to the company i work for has added a "regulatory warning " phrase after our companies offerings  - a false disclaimer that slants the light on our company to look  badly. and I am hearing here there is not a thing we can do to remove the slanderous content added to the wiki by  this person ???!!!!!

Confused here.  Your company has 'offerings' on the Wiki?  I didn't know the Wiki was for commercial purposes.

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Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

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FYI, Maestro closed  https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-7781  (Can't Edit Wiki)

 

Maestro Linden added a comment - 18/Nov/14 3:48 PM

Wiki edits are intentionally disabled, currently: http://status.secondlifegrid.net/2014/10/15/post2378/

There should be an update at http://status.secondlifegrid.net when this functionality is restored.

But the language on Grid Sratus is contradictory:

"Resolved 12:01 AM PDT, 15 October 2014] The unscheduled maintenance to the Second Life wiki is currently still in progress.  Please stay tuned to this blog for further updates."

It's resolved but still in progress?

 

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