Another step forward.

Quite some time ago, most of the people who run all the giant Fedora website steampunk machinery decided that it was high time we migrate to a wiki that better suits our needs. After some requirement gathering and research, MediaWiki became the clear winner for us for a number of reasons.

And a couple of days ago, thanks to the exceptional efforts of people like Ian Weller, Ricky Zhou, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams, Mike McGrath, and a host of representatives from the various subprojects of Fedora, our new wiki went live!

I’ve just had time to visit a few pages in the past couple of days, around other LinuxTag activities. Of course there are a small number of rough edges, but they are pretty much all expected thanks to all the testing these folks did, and none we can’t take care of easily. All these folks worked hard on learning how the application works, getting the wiki to look like the rest of our sites, hacking on scripts to migrate data from our old moin wiki, testing repeatedly and tirelessly, massaging content to get it ready for the move, keeping the whole community informed, and then watching over the actual conversion process.

The results to me are a huge success, and I think everyone is looking forward to having a very scalable and responsive site where we can reorganize our community assistance and documentation efforts. In support of the new wiki, Karsten Wade and the Documentation team will be stepping up efforts to “garden” the wiki, pruning out dead material, editing for clarity, and acting as a resource for all the teams and community groups using the wiki. In fact, there will probably be additional documentation produced faster by refocusing efforts on this new engine and inviting other Fedora members to join in and help.

And the best part is, now that you can create a new Fedora account so much more easily, AND because that account now integrates seamlessly with the MediaWiki instance, people can join Fedora and immediately start contributing knowledge and help to their fellow project members. Another barrier lowered substantially through teamwork and community.

Bravo to everyone who helped!

Aside to the concerned.

The recent casualty of the “220V demon” was just a crummy old $5 power strip. It was very late, and I was not thinking clearly when I popped an adapter on it and tried plugging it in. There wasn’t much magic smoke to escape, just enough though. Whee!