[Olpc-sysadmin] OLPC's Wiki: Designers and Sysadmin's needed

Seth Woodworth seth at laptop.org
Sun May 31 06:16:24 EDT 2009


Hi everyone,

I want to brief you about a project I want to work on in the next 10 days or
so involving OLPC's wiki.

*Background:*
OLPC's wiki is a resource for deployment countries, OLPC volunteers,
programmers, and educators, it contains support
information<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_FAQ>,
essays about education<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/What_makes_Mathematics_hard_to_learn%3F>,
obscure technical documentation
<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Early_boot>, and public
health <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health>.  It's a fairly large wiki at
about 8k articles, ~20k unique visitors a day from over a hundred countries,
and at various times in it's lifecycle been on the first page of results on
google for the term "wiki". (it's now on page 2)

*Standing issues:*
Wiki.laptop.org is messy.  In many ways wiki.laptop.org has never really had
a lot of time and effort dedicated by anyone to coordinate what goes on
there.  It is an untended garden, but it still grows great vegetables.  The
server that hosts wiki.l.o (pedal) also hosts a lot of mission-critical
services (email, etc), and contains some private information.  This makes it
really hard for volunteers to get access to the server to help us fix
things.

*Ideal situation:*
Ideally, wiki.laptop.org should be easier for the community to get
involved.  It should be on it's own server.  It should have more admin's.
It should have a skin and visual apearance other than that of default
mediawiki.  It should also be a lot more resistant to spam and vandalism.

*Plan of attack:*
We need to set up a test wiki on it's own virtual server.  This new wiki
should be the latest stable install of MediaWiki, with all of the plugins
that OLPC uses on the current wiki (or maybe not, we should evaluate what
we're using).  And ideally we would have a designer skin this new wiki
graphically.  Once we have this test wiki up and running, we can migrate the
wiki.l.o database to this new server.  Lastly we will move the
wiki.laptop.org domain to point to this new server.


This process needs to start with some information gathering and some
innitial coordination.  I will reach out to several lists early this week
and start this process.  This email is going to a few low-member # lists
(and individuals) who I think will have an interest and innitial feedback.
When the conversation really kicks off, we should use the Volunteer
Infrastructure Group list to coordinate our efforts.

For those of you who aren't yet members:
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sysadmin

Thank you,
Seth Woodworth
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