I've posted this letter at <a href="http://vig.laptop.org/wiki/index.php/Wiki_upgrade">http://vig.laptop.org/wiki/index.php/Wiki_upgrade</a> to initiate a collaboration page for the effort.<br><br>Please note that editing on the <a href="http://vig.laptop.org">vig.laptop.org</a> test/development wiki requires an email-confirmed account.<br>
<br> --Fred<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 6:16 AM, Seth Woodworth <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:seth@laptop.org">seth@laptop.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi everyone,<br><br>I want to brief you about a project I want to work on in the next 10 days or so involving OLPC's wiki.<br><br><b>Background:</b><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">OLPC's wiki is a resource for deployment countries, OLPC volunteers, programmers, and educators, it contains <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_FAQ" target="_blank">support information</a>, <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/What_makes_Mathematics_hard_to_learn%3F" target="_blank">essays about education</a>, <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Early_boot" target="_blank">obscure technical documentation</a>, and <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health" target="_blank">public health</a>. 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)<br>
</div><br><b>Standing issues:</b><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><a href="http://Wiki.laptop.org" target="_blank">Wiki.laptop.org</a> is messy. In many ways <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org" target="_blank">wiki.laptop.org</a> 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.<br>
</div><br><b>Ideal situation:</b><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">Ideally, <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org" target="_blank">wiki.laptop.org</a> 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.<br>
<br></div><b>Plan of attack:</b><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">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 <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org" target="_blank">wiki.laptop.org</a> domain to point to this new server.<br>
<br><br></div>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.<br>
<br>For those of you who aren't yet members: <a href="http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sysadmin" target="_blank">http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sysadmin</a><br><br>Thank you,<br><font color="#888888">Seth Woodworth<br>
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