Time to consolidate wikis?

For people following along this problem has been fixed.

It took me several cycles of using Matrix before I got to the "space" and was able to join the wiki room.

I feel you—Matrix can be tricky. In our improved wiki we will provide clearer guidance!

I strongly recommend consolidating all documentation on MediaWiki with edit access available to all community members, and administrative control access distributed amongst a Wiki Working Group. Contents of MediaWiki would be visible publicly.

MediaWiki is used across Wikimedia and elsewhere. All changes are recorded and can easily be rolled back to an earlier version should doing so become necessary.

MediaWiki is extremely powerful and easy to use with strong version control and places to Read, Talk, View history, easily see changes to the text, and communicate with one another.

I suspect that we can get MediaWiki as a service from our main service provider.

The hard part will be organizing our data in the most effective way, but whatever we do can be changed later.

I've been testing dokuwiki with our mastodon as a single sign on provider at https://wiki-dev.social.coop You can give it a try, but it is temporary, and just meant for experimenting.

The biggest issue is that I don't think Mastodon's API makes email addresses available, and the dokuwiki oauth plugin really wants to use emails to lookup users. I modified the plugin to assign an email based on the Mastodon username and the social.coop domain, which works. But you can't send emails to those addresses and you can't change it in your profile without breaking your ability to login.

I'm going to spend a bit more time to see if the oauth plugin can be customized to look up users with their login name instead of email. We can rely on these being unique from Mastodon.

If that doesn't pan out I wonder if asking people to register isn't so bad after all? It would still be an improvement on the situation with our git.coop wikis where people have difficulty jumping through all the hoops to register.

I am still reading this whole thread but I'll say this anyway: (1) I like DokuWiki XWiki; it has very sophisticated & granular permissioning (2) I also like the idea of SSO, and have some basic experience setting up Keycloak (3) getting DokuWiki XWiki to work with Keycloak was difficult for me, although it was my first time setting up anything SSO-related (4) my sense is that a lot of open-source software avoids documenting SSO particularly well because they put it into their paid offerings. I plan to attend a Tech Working Group meeting soon so I can get more understanding of the big picture.

(Edit- apologies, I misremembered and confused DokuWiki with XWiki. There are differences between the two and my sense is they each have their strengths.)

I think there should be a single wiki with page-specific access control. It can default to full edit, but particular pages could be locked or hidden from unauthenticated users. I think DokuWiki supports all of that. If not, XWiki definitely does. DokuWiki is simpler.

That said - I would discourage using even a private wiki page to store passwords (not that anyone was). For passwords I would suggest a separate system; a separate SOP. That's called "secret management". LastPass or BitWarden might be good solutions for that.

SSO might take longer to set up than people expect. It might work with one thing but not another, thereby making it not-SSO. It is still worth doing. I would just advise not to let snags on that front hold back progress on other fronts (eg using 1 wiki instead of 3).

I've made some major strides in consolidating our current material on wiki.social.coop. Please share any feedback.

The tech team is still struggling to find the right alternative wiki platform that would allow all members to contribute. But the current model at least enables people with git.coop accounts (generally, working group members) to contribute.

TY for the reminder about git.coop membership. :D

Just to clarify the struggle isn't so much the wiki (it would be relatively easy to bring up dokuwiki, mediawiki, etc) but how to do authentication without creating yet-another-login.

I don't really see this as a problem.

Anyone who wants can already look at the publicly available wikipages.

Editing/changing the wiki is something that most users don't need to do every day, so having a separate log-in would mean having to be deliberate about what you are doing. :D

For the London Hackspace wiki, the extra layer of protection helped reduce the attempts by spambots. :D

In case anyone goes searching for it I left some notes about the dokuwiki / mastodon integration test in this issue: https://git.coop/social.coop/tech/operations/-/issues/53#note_19784

Kudos to @jonny for making this happen, and to @ntnsndr for the support. I'm positively impressed. Thank you all.

@Daniel Thanks for your concern. We are hoping to have an SSO setup for this in the future. I think that MediaWiki, as a highly standard, extensible tool, puts us in a good position for that. But currently SSO is a bigger challenge than just the wiki, and the Tech Working Group has been thinking through various options for months. I personally think SSO is important for us, and I hope we can find a comprehensive, elegant solution soon. But I don't think we want to hold up the wiki work to wait for that.

cc: @Aaron Wolf

Great work doing this! Would love to see the best contenders for git-backed wikis because i'd like those on other projects. Mediawiki still feels

Or on the other hand, would Social dot coop consider hosting mediawiki wikis for members? 🙂

I corrected one typo on the front page last week, can people easily see that revision?

Are there content organization or navigation features we can turn on? Reproducing the current wiki is one thing but an improvement with autogenerated menus would be nice.

Thanks for fixing a typo! Yes, your correction can be seen here.

I agree we could use better content navigation. Suggestions (or direct experimentation!) are very welcome.

I don't think it makes sense for social.coop to host wikis for members. That drastically increases the expectations for maintenance, and it doesn't seem aligned with our core mission.

Update! Thanks to the efforts of @Flancian @jonny @Ed Summers @3wordchant and others from the TWG, we now have a new wiki! It's a MediaWiki system, which catches us up to the state of the art of wiki-dom.

Also, more ambitiously, this is the first app that uses our new auth.social.coop user-management system. This is still being tested, but stay tuned for its rollout across the ecosystem.

This took longer than expected, but it was done right. I'm really proud of our team for getting us this far through a collaborative, thoughtful process.

Jump in at https://wiki.social.coop.

@Nathan Schneider

How do i login?

I couldn't find the registration link.

@Billy Smith hi Billy! we hadn't yet enabled user registrations. Would you like to give it a try now and help us test? :) The 'log in' link in wiki.social.coop should take you to an auth.social.coop URL where you can choose 'register'.

@Flancian In terms of strategy for the future: Should we allow anyone to register, or should we manage registration centrally, as the main means of membership management? I just want to make sure we don't create a pattern now that we will regret later?

@Nathan Schneider yes, very good point :) I think the most stable configuration would be:

1. We hook up the existing registration form process into creating an auth.social.coop user for new signups -- this could be a manual step at first.

2. We do a one-time import (backfill) of all active instance users into auth.social.coop, maybe CSV based.

A possible variation would be:

1. We move our registration process to be auth.social.coop based -- in particular if we find e.g. a Keycloak plugin that can afford us enough flexibility.

In any case I agree leaving registrations wide open is probably not what we want in the medium term -- happy to disable them anytime, I just thought it'd lower friction for any users interested in wiki editing now like Billy.

@Flancian

Able to register and log-in fine. :D

@Flancian Always happy to help with beta-testing. :D

Is it possible to fix redirects? https://wiki.social.coop/How-to-make-the-fediverse-your-own.html should go to https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/How_to_Make_the_Fediverse_Your_Own now; instead it redirects to the wiki homepage.

@benjamin melançon Tagging @jonny who has been the wiki guru!

@benjamin melançon I agree with the intent of redirecting, but where did you see this link to the .html page? Fixing links whenever we can would be a low tech solution.