Wiki dead? Not any more!

[Atari74user]

Yea, I saw he was made aware of my comments on his forum but he hasn't offered to help, and Dal hasn't responded to my PM asking if he had objections to a mirror going up - which with the issues before with Exxos mirroring things seemed wise to get before approaching Exxos.

Yeah that was me, hope you don't mind. Exxos was posting about it, he stated he approached Dal, but it seemed you were really keen to get things sorted, so made him aware. Really appreciate the effort!

[mikro]

Just for the record, I converted FreeMiNT's wiki (originally in MediaWiki format) to github's wiki quite easily -- mostly done by public scripts. IMO this is the best place to preserve the wiki, another private/temporary hosting site will sooner or later disappear.

[Grabulosaure]

Here is a mirror of the wiki : https://temlib.org/AtariForumWiki/index.php/Main_Page

READ ONLY

[mfro]

... IMO this is the best place to preserve the wiki, another private/temporary hosting site will sooner or later disappear...

Not sure if this will be the best place in midterm future anymore. This one makes me a bit uneasy: https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/3/17422 ... ion-rumors

If this is true, I don't see a too bright future for github anymore.
Microsoft has a tendency to turn anything they touch into unusable crap sooner or later. Should be rather called "Midas-Soft".

[Rustynutt]

... IMO this is the best place to preserve the wiki, another private/temporary hosting site will sooner or later disappear...

Not sure if this will be the best place in midterm future anymore. This one makes me a bit uneasy: https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/3/17422 ... ion-rumors

If this is true, I don't see a too bright future for github anymore.
Microsoft has a tendency to turn anything they touch into unusable crap sooner or later. Should be rather called "Midas-Soft".

So, back to SourceForge?

[joska]

Just for the record, I converted FreeMiNT's wiki (originally in MediaWiki format) to github's wiki quite easily -- mostly done by public scripts. IMO this is the best place to preserve the wiki, another private/temporary hosting site will sooner or later disappear.

I must admit that I don't like github wiki. Like the rest of github it's not very usable for non-developers, mediawiki-wikis are much easier to use and navigate for "normal" users.

[AnthonyJ]

Here is a mirror of the wiki : https://temlib.org/AtariForumWiki/index.php/Main_Page

READ ONLY

Looks like a good mirror, ty.

[mikro]

I must admit that I don't like github wiki. Like the rest of github it's not very usable for non-developers, mediawiki-wikis are much easier to use and navigate for "normal" users.

Maybe it's because I didn't bother really with the overal UX. There's plenty of beautiful wikis on github. One just needs to customise the index on the right to something usable (instead of the current raw search of wiki page titles).

When having a good navigation, the wiki is pleasure to update -- everything done via the UI and if you want to do some serious changes, you can clone it as another git repository.

[wongck]

If this is true, I don't see a too bright future for github anymore.
Microsoft has a tendency to turn anything they touch into unusable crap sooner or later. Should be rather called "Midas-Soft".

It is true.
MS bought GitHub for over 7 billions dollars making the 3 founders billionaire. It on Bloomberg.

[catmando]

Here is a mirror of the wiki : https://temlib.org/AtariForumWiki/index.php/Main_Page

READ ONLY

Great work, maybe this can be dropped back on the original server now?

[Atari74user]

Yep, good work all!

[Gaiyan]

Here is a mirror of the wiki : https://temlib.org/AtariForumWiki/index.php/Main_Page

READ ONLY

Thanks. Appreciate it.

[mfro]

If this is true, I don't see a too bright future for github anymore.
Microsoft has a tendency to turn anything they touch into unusable crap sooner or later. Should be rather called "Midas-Soft".

It is true.
MS bought GitHub for over 7 billions dollars making the 3 founders billionaire. It on Bloomberg.

... and it appears that released a landslide (towards gitlab): https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db ... 90d&to=now

[dhedberg]

Here is a mirror of the wiki : https://temlib.org/AtariForumWiki/index.php/Main_Page
READ ONLY

Thanks! Any chance of making this the official wiki with write-access? What's Dal's view on it?

[Grabulosaure]

Here is a mirror of the wiki : https://temlib.org/AtariForumWiki/index.php/Main_Page
READ ONLY

Thanks! Any chance of making this the official wiki with write-access? What's Dal's view on it?

I made it read-only out of respect for the authors.

The best solution is to fix the original wiki. AFAIU, the database is sane. Maybe reinstalling MediaWiki could be sufficient.
I don't know MediaWiki well enough to really clone the original site. Templates seem broken and the import is visible in page history.

For write access... I could enable it, with new users, if everyone agrees, but alterations would have to be manually copied back to the original wiki when it will be fixed.

Alternatively, I could add an empty wiki as temporary storage for new content. But it needs people willing to add content.

[wongck]

It's not a mirror if it contents are updated.... it becomes more up to date than what's it mirrors.

I dunno....

May be a temp empty wiki for the new content that will need to be added back to the original wiki when ( when, if or whatever) it get corrected and back online.

[dhedberg]

I agree that it wouldn't be a great idea to open it up for write-access if Dal's going to fix the original, but we've been waiting for that to happen for a while (years?) and I frankly don't think Dal has the time, so if he'd agree to let somebody else take over the Wiki, I think it'd the best solution.

[LynXX]

Nice work! How did you do it, did you have access to the original DB? I had in mind a similar thing by fetching the content via the API from the original site but never got around to do it...

+1 on opening write access, it's been broken for more than one year now and there's no news despite multiple contact attempts, so in my opinion there's no point in waiting more... If it didn't happen in 1+ year, it won't happen any time soon.

If for some reason the original wiki gets back up, then the DB can be exchanged back and put back on the original server, I guess.

Also, how can we make sure that doesn't happen again? Could the database be exposed / exported regularly somewhere for people to do external backups? Could the control over the hostname and the server shared among multiple people?

[Marsupilami]

Hi, if i can help...What is the storage space needed ? and bandwidth ?

[Bikerbob]

I agree that it wouldn't be a great idea to open it up for write-access if Dal's going to fix the original, but we've been waiting for that to happen for a while (years?) and I frankly don't think Dal has the time, so if he'd agree to let somebody else take over the Wiki, I think it'd the best solution.

Where is this at??? its a real disservice to not have this wiki being updated and being useful to the community.

I found the mirrored page.. but those cannot be modified. If we have this mirror.. and it is a complete mirror.. why can we not just host it somewhere else and get going again on the wiki.. Atari-Forum.. or just Atari.. or whatever.. lets get it going.

James

[arf]

Just for the record, I converted FreeMiNT's wiki (originally in MediaWiki format) to github's wiki quite easily -- mostly done by public scripts. IMO this is the best place to preserve the wiki, another private/temporary hosting site will sooner or later disappear.

Unless Github will be the new Myspace in a few years, see their massive data loss from this week. The lost all media of 12 years.

Google’s Usenet archive is now mainly defunct. Trusting the big ones can fail easily, too.

Decentralized, spreaded replications/mirrors are a good idea. Plus Internet Archive and/or public repos.

[tzok]

Wiki is dead for ages, apparently Atari enthusiasts are good only in Atari stuff, but stayed in the Atari era with new technologies. Wiki's database seems to be intact, so no need to use backups. You only need to do an proper database export and import to new version. What had happened is that someone had updated heavily modded wiki engine to a new, but vanilla version and presentation layer crashed.

[Grabulosaure]

Hi, if i can help...What is the storage space needed ? and bandwidth ?

About the mirror hosted on temlib.org for around 6 months

The MediaWiki database size is 257MB
Monthly bandwidth usage is around 500...600MB, principally from US (23%) , UK(12%) and Germany(12%).
The pages about ACSI, SCSI and IDE and Atari ST motherboard revisions are particularly popular (and the main page, of course).
Most external links come from this forum and from Facebook, but it is very small compared to Google searches.

I can enable write accesses, or create an empty Wiki (and if someone knowledgeable with MediaWiki wants to help...). Well, actually write accesses are not disabled: Only registered users can edit, and user creation is disabled...

I had no access to the original database, this mirror was made with scripts available on MediaWiki installation. Anyone else can create his/her own copy.

[Dal]

Right - this does need to be sorted and I simply don't have the time to focus on it, so if someone could pm me to get this sorted, I'm sure we can work it out..

[Dal]

The Wiki is alive!

Huge thanks to Tin for doing the real work and getting the MediaWiki platform upgraded whilst preserving all the data.

Also, thanks must go to Grabulosaure who has been hosting a mirror of the wiki in read-only mode while the main site was down.