Fremantle
· Wikispore · Wikimedia · MediaWiki · system administration ·
On Friday evening I attended an online meeting about Wikispore, the new-ish project that's aiming to find a place in the wikiverse for content that isn't suitable for existing Wikimedia projects. I really like the idea, although I know it's hardly a new one and that people have been working on various things like this for decades now. Like any nascent project, the important parts of it aren't really the technical ones (although they're crucial too in lots of ways) but rather it's the people involved and the communication that's most interesting. I feel like the community around Wikispore is friendly, knowledgeable, and sensible — and so I'm hopeful that it can be a success.
My main involvement so far as been to try to help upgrade the test instance at wikispore-test.wmflabs.org, to help get some new extensions installed (including my own new one, UnlinkedWikibase). Thus far, I've been a bit of a failure at the upgrade! The system is on a Cloud Services VPS, and runs the wiki via Vagrant. I know it outs me as a deviant WMF developer (perhaps less so these days now that all the cool kids are moving to Docker), but I've never used Vagrant very much for development or deployment. So I don't really know what I'm doing. The current issue is that Vagrant is still on PHP 7.3 and needs to be updated to 7.4.
For the time being I think I'll retreat to trying to get my own wiki back up and running in the way I want it (it's looking likely that I'll dump Twyne, sadly).