Meta talk:MetaProject to transfer content to MediaWiki.org

Start Tagging? Template design

Well I like the way this sub-project has been described. All makes sense to me. But we didn't start tagging pages yet. Are we ready to do that?

I'm just thinking maybe the Template:MoveToMediaWiki is a bit too obtrusive. D'you think it might cause some upset if we wade in with this on every page for the documentation? Obviously the move itself will inevitably cause some upset and probably we're looking at a timescale of several months before it would happen, so that's a long time to have an ugly message at the top of all the user manuals. Perhaps something smaller (just on one line?). It could be made more prominent again just prior to the move. ...or maybe it's OK as it is. Just thinking aloud really. -- Harry Wood 16:27, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

You might be right. Mind you, it's a template. I suggest we start tagging and if there are complaints then we can easily modify the template as required. Or maybe just go ahead and modify it anyway if you're worried - either way it shouldn't hold up the tagging of pages. --HappyDog 12:32, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Tagging

General messages for all help pages are put in Template:H:h Help, not in individual pages. The general feeling is that these messages should be kept very short, to avoid clutter.--Patrick 08:27, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

What to move

(initial comments moved from project page)

• Need to decide how to handle pages that cover content for the PD Help: namespace.
  • I would suggest initially that they are transferred into the GFDL Manual: namespace so that we have a comprehensive set of help docs from the start. Once the PD equivalent of a page has been written we may decide to delete the GFDL version. It is important that GFDL content does not end up in the PD namespace! --HappyDog 15:31, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
    • Not to be inflammatory about it, but it's equally important that we don't just copy indiscriminate crap, including out of date or plain incorrect content over. Rob Church (talk) 11:19, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

(end moved material)

Hmmm... I think this needs a bit of discussion. My feeling is that all MediaWiki content on meta should be deleted after it's moved (possibly with redirects) otherwise we end up with a lot of duplication and potential forking. If there is a specific reason for it to remain on meta (e.g. help pages that are customised for Wikimedia projects and not so relevant to MW itself) then fine, but all other information should go. Therefore if there is any value in keeping the information at all it should be transferred to MW.org. That said, you're right - we don't want to clutter up MW.org with a lot of out-of-date or incorrect content, which is why I'm leaning towards moving the content initially into a kind of transwiki area, from which it can be tidied up and checked before going into a proper namespace (or possibly being deleted/merged into existing articles). If it is obvious junk of course, it can be deleted here immediately without being moved.

With regards the PD Help: namespace that the original point was about, the issue I was raising was that we are likely to transfer content to MW (and remove from meta) before the PD manual is finished, therefore we will need to run the existing GFDL manual in parallel for a while. Once content has been added to the PD manual then we should be able to delete the GFDL version. --HappyDog 12:46, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Let me tell you one thing: if you start to move the GFDL manual from meta to mediawiki.org there will never be a PD manual because there's simply not enough pressure to create one. Besides, in my opinion, the meta manual is an unreadable, very ugly looking and not very user friendly mess of pages with an enormous amount of even more ugly templates. The clean solution: migrate the relevant and up to date content to the PD manual and delete the stuff on meta once finished. --Elian 17:32, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Help namespace on mediawiki.org is not available

Other projects (including Wikipedia) copy the GFDL help pages from the master pages on Meta (with project-specific content achieved by templates). The help namespace on mediawiki.org is not available for these master pages because it is used for PD content. Therefore it is not clear how it can still be practical to put the GFDL master pages on that site. Are the copies on other sites supposed to move to another namespace too? Are parameters or variables used for the namespace names in links, so that copying the master pages remains easy even though the namespace names are different?--Patrick 00:16, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

The documentation should stay where it is, here

The help system is tricky stuff, it's designed to reside on Meta with its multilingual help namespaces. Other projects can copy what they need, or simply link to pages here if they don't have any specific add-ons. It barely works, it's not trivial, and years of efforts went into the help system as it is, check out w:Help:Help and the original w:Template:Ph:Help.

Screwing with this help system is counter-productive. Who's supposed to edit help pages on MW? This isn't a server open for the public. How should projects in other languages continue to do their translations if the English community moves their tools and help pages to a different server? Without the infrastructure of templates available now they're doomed. The state is bad, this proposal is a recipe to make it worse. -- Omniplex (w:t) 03:01, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Certainly if this move is not done carefully it could result in some mess and confusion, but even then, it would not be counter-productive in my opinion. The information needs to be put in the right place, otherwise it's confusing. Simple as that.

But you raise some good points about multilingual support and wikipedia integration.

I don't understand what you mean by "This isn't a server open for the public". -- Harry Wood 12:53, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't know of any automated processes, so perhaps someone who is involved in that could describe how (and where) they work. The idea on MW.org is to create a set of Help: namespace pages that can be copied into any wiki. These should be self-contained and applicable to all situations. It will be less template-based than the current version (probably) and completely copyright free (i.e. new wikis will have the help pages available by default, without also needing to include the full edit history). It is a cut-down version of what is currently in the help namespace here on meta however, so if other sites are sourcing their content direct from here in an automated fashion (which I find a little odd), we may need to rethink how we make the transfer.

The issue of non-English versions of the help content is a very important one that hasn't been addressed yet. Ditto the problem of overlap (i.e. the transfer is likely to happen before the PD versions of the pages are complete). Any suggestions on either of these topics are very welcome. --HappyDog 02:28, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

PS - re: "This isn't a server open for the public" - this is clearly untrue - MW.org is as public as meta!

Two different things which should not be mixed up are:

• creating PD Help pages, a "compressed user guide, not a reference work"
• moving help pages from Meta (more detailed, a reference work) to a namespace such as "GFDL help" on mediawiki.org

The first is fine anyway. For considering the second, one should familiarize oneself with the current set-up, see Help:MediaWiki help policy. Note that it is a multilingual system that should not be broken by moving one language. As a preparation help pages could be made portable to a namespace with a different name, see Portability of help pages to a namespace with a different name.

w:User:Uncle G's 'bot has been copying help pages from Meta to various projects (current situation is unclear, last time this was done for Wikipedia was 31 Jan 2006). Alternatively they are copied by hand from time to time.--Patrick 08:57, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

The way I see things is we have one set of help pages for two different tasks. Firstly we have pages used by some Foundation projects which are copied over in their entirety. These should be concise, non-technical pages such as Help:Edit summary. Secondly we have MediaWiki pages for site administrators. These should contain technical details. For example Help:Guide for system administrators for setting up interwiki linking. In my opinion meta pages should host Foundation pages (like a Commons for documentation); the technical pages should be moved to MediaWiki.org. This means some pages will need to be divided, with technical information going to MediaWiki.org and user information staying here. This raises the question of documentation for users (rather than administrators) of non-Foundation wikis. These may need to be generalised for non-Foundation wikis. In that case, they might be located on MediaWiki.org.

The help pages currently serve neither group particularly well - many need complete refactoring. I feel we do need a reorganisation here but it should be very carefully planned, considering the needs of Foundation project users and the administrators & users of other wikis. The end result as far as help pages are concerned, should be pages which have a distinct purpose, here and on MediaWiki.org. Meta currently seems like a bit of a dumping ground and its help pages need a "target audience" if they are to become a quality, easy to use resource. Given this shake-up, it seems like the time to fully consider the role(s) of the help pages, rather than just move them to another website. Gareth Aus 07:10, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

1. re: Harry Wood: I've confused WMF and MW. But I'm one of the users who can't use Special:Captcha and refuse to bother an admin with it, so from my POV it's the same anyway, commons: and mw: and foundation: are read only. Unlike m:, I could edit here before an admin created an account for me.
2. Generally, maybe it makes sense to move the Hacker and System admin handbooks, at least it's almost impossible to make it worse for these pages, for some even blanking would be progress. And they're not used on w:en:, only Reader, Editor, and parts of the future Moderator handbook are interesting for normal editors. The manual TRANSWIKI copying is rather weird, but for some pages it makes sense, if project specific stuff can be inserted with the established template magic.
3. Multilingualism, I've no clue what the state is, two help namespaces are empty, see WM:HELP, but two languages (bg + el) are apparently waiting to get their own help namespaces here. For Template:ill (inter language link) it's almost irrelevant where a translation is, different page, different namespace, or different server, anything goes, e.g. {{ParserFunctions}} could work as is if copied from Meta to another server. But obviously there must be a master copy, and so far that's here on Meta. -- Omniplex (w:t) 10:48, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia integration issue

Wikipedia (and other projects?) use a mechanism to automatically copy content from meta into some of its help pages. See this w:Template:Ph:Help. I don't fully understand how it works, but presumably the move would mean it needs to switch over and suck its information from mediawiki.org instead of meta. Possible problems with this? -- Harry Wood 12:53, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Never heard about such a system. At least for the german wikipedia I can state that it has its own, local, completely separate documentation pages on de:Hilfe:MediaWiki. Documentation on meta is not used. --Elian 15:07, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Dann unterstütze bitte meinen Vorschlag, 43 obsolete Hilfeumleitungen von Help nach Hilfe hier auf Meta in die Tonne zu treten, diese uralten deutschen Seiten nerven etwas beim Umgang mit dem Help Namensraum. -- Omniplex (w:t) 11:16, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes Wp and other English foundation projects copy pages from meta (see w:Help:Minor edit). Note that down the bottom of the page, copies of the page on other projects are listed. You can also see the Wikipedia-specific information section - this is an automaticly added template. The logo at the top of the page is another template which can be used for similar purposes. Indeed the wikitext is copied and pasted from meta exactly - everything else on the page is strung together through templates. Gareth Aus 07:28, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Transfer: by Category or by Template?

If it is done by category it is easy to just throw the category in as a sub cat instead of tagging all of the individual pages. Kotepho 10:20, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure what you mean - can you elaborate? --HappyDog 18:39, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I think he means is that if we are going to use the What links here page of the template to get the articles OK. But if we are going to use the category we could just put the large categories, which only contain pages to be moved to MW in them, in the main move to MW category. Lcarsdata 16:28, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

In which case, no. Categories may not be completely up-to-date, and more importantly, if a bot is used to transfer the content it needs to recursively follow all links, and possibly parse the wiki text. Marking individual pages is a lot simpler. --HappyDog 14:10, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Whats the current status of this project?

Hello, I'm just curious what the current status of this project is? I see there's lots of issues on the TODO list to deal with, but where are we at at the moment? --mw:User:Rick 00:05, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

There has been a fair amount of talk at the current issues page on MW.org about some of the key elements of this project, but not a lot of decisions. The language issue looks close to being sorted out, and the pages are likely to go into a separate 'transwiki' namespace so that we can sort and organise the site properly (not discussed, but to me it seems like the only sensible option). It also seems that a lot of pages have been tagged for moving, but I don't know what proportion of the necessary pages this actually represents. The big issues are on the meta side of things - what to do with moved pages (delete/redirect/etc) and how the actual export will be handled. Any input would be welcome - I am not very active on meta, so perhaps this could be championed by someone 'local' as well. --HappyDog 01:10, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Is developer documentation (for mediawiki hacking) definitely moving? The FAQ was moved to mediawiki.org, but so much useful developer documentation remains on meta.wikimedia.org. I added backlinks but it's a bit messy. -- skierpage 02:06, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, ultimately. Initially the emphasis was on the extensions, as they are fairly self-contained and easy to move, however the process has stalled slightly as we wait for single-user sign-on (to avoid mis-attribution). However, I'm increasingly of the opinion that any problems SUL fixes will apply retroactively anyway, so I might begin importing pages again. I'm away for a few weeks now, so I'll see what the situation is like when I get back. Anyway - all that's rather tangentual. Short answer is yes. --HappyDog 00:17, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Preventing editing once exported

A possible solution to attempt to stop people editing the pages is to change the {{MoveToMediaWiki}} template to a huge, bold, red warning informing people that the content has been moved and to edit it on MediaWiki, a link to the page on mw could also be automatically linked to using template syntax. Lcarsdata 16:24, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Transferring some pages

I think it would be a good idea to gradually transfer and clean a small batch of pages, rather than wait untill every single page that will be tagged has been tagged and then do the lot. It would allow us to see how far we are and make it harder to miss pages. Any thoguhts? Lcarsdata 16:51, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Problem with attributing edits when moving pages

Please note that contributions may be attributed to the wrong user when a page is moved to another wiki. See bugzilla:8537 for details. To me this seems a big issue with any large scale interwiki operation, which can only be overcome by single sign-on. -- Duesentrieb 14:42, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

That is a good point. When is single sign-on expected, and will this solve the problem? If the answers are (realistically) 'soon' and 'yes' then we should postpone further transwikis until then. If not then I'm not sure what to suggest. --HappyDog 22:57, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Ah yes. Very true. When a page with it's editing history is moved to mediawiki.org using the export & import machanism, the history will be presevered, but the links to user pages will be dead links, or (even worse) links to user accounts with the same name created on MW.org which are not necessarily the same person as on this wiki. Quite a big problem for this project.

I notice Brion's commented on it implying single sign-on will be in place soon.

Only other solution I could imagine, would be a code change somehow allowing these older user links to point at user pages on this wiki -- Harry Wood 13:55, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

From what I've read so far, it seems to me that once SUL is implemented, all moved edits will automatically be re-assigned as appropriate, so is there any reason why we can't just carry on with the transwiki? --HappyDog 00:19, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Can anyone help?

I'd like to help chip away at moving the extensions over, can anyone do it or is it only for admins? --Nad 02:10, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

You have to be an admin on mediawiki.org, but not here on meta. -- 217.234.253.157 09:40, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm trying to do that, but am encountering resistance from one mediawiki.org admin, Max Semenik (also SUL'd as MaxSem here). He wrote "We've declined or mokusatsu'd several such requests before because it is generally considered that everything worth importing has already been imported. Do you have examples of anything worth importing here? Note that Meta's desire to get rid of offtopic pages does not automatically mean that they should be moved here, deletion also works." in this edit, and he has tagged many pages with {{MoveToMediaWikiRejected}}.   — Jeff G. ツ 17:04, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

There should be some mechanism (perhaps a new set of categories) to mark the historical discussions, proposals, and extension pages as historical and/or as dangerous. That would provide direction to users happening upon such pages. There is a reason behind each and every categorization in Category:Pages to be exported to MediaWiki.org - perhaps a new Meta:Requests for export to MediaWiki.org process modeled on Meta:Requests for deletion would be helpful for centralizing discussion of such pages for which that categorization is questioned.   — Jeff G. ツ 16:53, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Poke anyone on #mediawiki, and they'll see what you can do. Titoxd^(?!?) 07:03, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Help:Inputbox

This extension (which, you'll note, is already moved) should obviously also be moved (to Extension:Inputbox, I propose). -Eep² 07:33, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Note: apparently "which" refers to the page "extension", not to "this extension".--Patrick (talk) 08:34, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Right, but Inputbox is an extension, isn't it? -Eep² 08:52, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I am not sure. For a user of Wikimedia there is little need to distinguish core MediaWiki features and features based on installed extensions. So it may be convenient to have the relevant GFDL help pages together. Perhaps we shoud only move installation info to mw:Extension:Inputbox, and provide a link from there to m:Help:Inputbox for user info.--Patrick (talk) 08:29, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Was Infobox added/implemented/incorporated (in)to MediaWiki 1.10 (it's not in 1.9.3, the version I use)? It still shows up in Special:Version on this wiki (currently 1.11 alpha), implying it's not a core feature and that MediaWiki does not have code separate from the extension that can do what the extension can. If I'm mistaken, Help:Inputbox needs to be reworded as such, but I'm pretty sure Infobox is still a separate extension and can be treated as such (and moved to MW.org accordingly). -Eep² 08:52, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I did not say that it is not an extension, I said that for a user of Wikimedia there is little need to distinguish core MediaWiki features and features based on installed extensions.--Patrick (talk) 09:05, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

What features does MediaWiki have that are based on this extension? Obviously, there is a need to distinguish core MediaWiki features from MediaWiki extensions (which I believe Inputbox to be) or else why bother even having a separate section for extensions in the first place? Perhaps if you reword what you're trying to say, if I'm still misunderstanding you... -Eep² 09:51, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps you misread "Wikimedia" as "MediaWiki"? I mean that a user of Wikimedia is interested in the features of Wikimedia wikis, regardless of whether they are due to an extension.--Patrick (talk) 11:12, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Right...and this is a prime reason why it's not a good idea to name a company after its main product...even if they switch the syllables around. <eyeroll> Anyway, you're right that a Wikimedia wiki user may be interested in Wikimedia wiki features, but such features enabled only through MediaWiki extensions should be redirected to the MediaWiki wiki (even if they're in use on all Wikimedia projects). Are other extensions (like Extension:Cite, mw:Extension:Newuserlog, etc) in use by Wikimedia projects also covered on the Meta Wikimedia wiki (huh?)? There should be a proper mw:Extension:Inputbox page which will essentially copy Help:Inputbox completely, which is why I think the Wikimedia page should just be moved over to MediaWiki wiki...(are you confused yet?) -Eep² 13:57, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Can we pick this up?

Hello, i'm quite new here and looking at the dates these conversations were had i'm hoping someone's still here to help out. Although a bulk of the content on here have been moved to Mediawiki.org, there's still some left, so when i stumbled on this page i thought to ask if anyone here has an update on pages that haven't yet been moved and duplicated pages like this which exists on here Salima Rabiu (talk) 02:50, 24 April 2024 (UTC)