RE: W3C wikis and preservation

I am happy to confirm, as I announced during the recent AC meeting, that
I have completed and demonstrated a means to port MoinMoin content to
MediaWiki, while preserving all of the original page URLs and all of the
edit history of all those pages. The only exception is MoinMoin
attachments, for which a deterministic URL redirect is necessary because
the MoinMoin server references those resources via an ugly GET with
parameters.

I have also given some thought to the possibility of capturing the state
of an entire wiki and converting it into a set of fixed pages (i.e. no
wiki server behind it) to be applied to wikis that have "died". This
would enable the pages to be preserved ad infinitum (well, as long as
the Web servers are running) and reduce the processing load on the wiki
servers.

I am not involved in the planning process for the introduction of
MediaWiki in W3C, though I can confirm that there is much interest and
demand. It was because some who had already embarked on a MoinMoin wiki
wanted to migrate to MediaWiki that I took upon myself the challenge of
writing some software to do the conversion while preserving the original
wiki (the content, history and original URLs where possible). My
activity is purely self-driven. I'm not acting on behalf of the W3C, but
as a chair of one of the W3C's groups I am responding to requests from
the participants and doing what I can to help.

Hopefully I will be soon putting the migration of the DDWG wiki into
effect, and I'm happy to share this experience with other groups who
would like to follow suit.

Hope this helps.

---Rotan. 

-----Original Message-----
From: public-wiki-dev-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-wiki-dev-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Baker
Sent: 20 November 2007 07:34
To: public-wiki-dev
Subject: W3C wikis and preservation


Dear all,

I am co-chair of Semantic Web Deployment WG, where we make
extensive use of MoinMoin wiki.

I have alot of questions about MediaWiki and the planned
migration (e.g., practicalities, timeframe), but I also have
some more general questions about the strategic role of wikis
in W3C.  In SWD, we use the wikis for almost all collaborative
writing and CVS almost only for formal publication.  

One fundamental question: What are the prospects for the
preservation of MoinMoin (and MediaWiki) content and the
citability of wiki documents in the long term?  The SWD
meeting records and postings in the mailing list such as [1]
currently cite documents such as [2].  How long will these
links likely remain resolvable?

Is there a document or meeting record describing the W3C use
of wikis and the planned migration to MediaWiki (e.g., with
a comparison to MoinMoin) that I can read to get up to speed?

Tom

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2007Oct/0042.html
[2]
http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SkosDesign/ConceptSemantics/MinimalPr
oposal?action=recall&rev=3

-- 
Thomas Baker <baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de>
W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group
http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2007 10:22:21 UTC