[Help required] We need volunteers to help us pull out relevant content from Mozilla India wiki

[Priyanka Nag]

Hey awesome Mozillians,

The documentation task-force needs your help! Many of you might be aware of
the fact that a year back we have had a spam attack on the Mozilla India
wiki and since then, even after several rounds of manual cleaning, we have
not been able to clean the wiki up completely. We have finally decided to
do away with the current wiki instance and update to a more recent version.

But, before we migrate to the new instance of media wiki, we need to
manually pull out the existing relevant content from the wiki. If you have
some spare time this *Saturday, 13th June 2015, (any time between 10am to
10pm)*, do join us and help us pull out all existing relevant content which
we can carry forward to the new instance. The job is gonna be very simple
and doesn't require any technical expertise.

Fill in your details in the google form [1], if you think you can even
spare 30-45 mins in the entire 12 hour span and I will share further
details with you.


P.S - Yes, we will try to make the entire activity fun and also be giving
away special badges to most active contributors against this task.


[1] http://goo.gl/forms/HXTQzHVFDx



--
Regards,
Priyanka Nag
Technical Writer, Red Hat

Website: priynag.in
Blog: priyankaivy.blogspot.in/

[Priyanka Nag]

Hey all,

First and foremost, I would like to send out huge hugs to the following
people:

- Abhishek Potnis
- Akshay S Dinesh
- Shashank Jaiswal
- Tanzeel Khan

These people were instrumental in pulling out all the relevant pages from
the Mozilla India wiki, making it now possible for the wiki instance to be
updated. Thank you all for the awesome work.

I am sharing the list of all the pages [1] we have retrieved. If you have
ever created a page on Mozilla India wiki and you don't see it already
listed here, please let me know asap.


[1]
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D1Q-LYqmwFUidVYghoeMWUFAImx0pB2nRJ3rw_w3Iq0/edit?usp=sharing
<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D1Q-LYqmwFUidVYghoeMWUFAImx0pB2nRJ3rw_w3Iq0/edit#gid=0>

[Soumya Deb]

Thanks for driving this Priyanka. The content fragmentation was getting out
of hands.

Let's make sure all the India-community specific information goes into
wiki.mozillaindia.org & not in wiki.mozilla.org/India. Recently, there has
been a massive surge in content split in these two places.

Meanwhile, what can be a better edit-access model, or if/whether we need
more automation bots/plugins etc. those discussions are essential too. The
doc platform no only needs to sustain, but also needs to grow
(horizontally/in-volume, and vertically/in-excellence).

> _______________________________________________
> community-india mailing list
> communi...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/community-india
>



--
*Soumya Deb*
*http://debs.io/ <http://debs.io>*
Twitter: *@Debloper <http://twitter.com/Debloper>*
Open Source Evangelist

[Soumya Deb]

BTW, where are the badges! :3
I know I don't deserve it... but I wanna drool at it - show me! :v

[Akshay S Dinesh]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 1:38 AM, Soumya Deb <debl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Let's make sure all the India-community specific information goes into
> wiki.mozillaindia.org & not in wiki.mozilla.org/India. Recently, there has
> been a massive surge in content split in these two places.
>

Yes, let's please do this. It's been a tough thing to do, keeping two wikis
updated. Since we have a wiki on mozillaindia, that is the right place for
all India-specific content. It is also easier to give more people edit
access to these, I think.

But, just a heads-up, the wiki has not been updated yet. Who's deleting all
the pages and updating the installation? (We need a special badge for this
person, let me suggest - wiki exterminator :D)

> Meanwhile, what can be a better edit-access model, or if/whether we need
> more automation bots/plugins etc. those discussions are essential too. The
> doc platform no only needs to sustain, but also needs to grow
> (horizontally/in-volume, and vertically/in-excellence).
>

I went through wiki.mozilla.org/Special:Version to find out what plugins
are used on that wiki. Here are some interesting ones:
- ImportFromEtherpad: Mediawiki extension for creating a wiki page from an
etherpad link [allows saving meeting notes in a stable way]
- RSS: The RSS extension renders ("displays") one or more RSS feeds on a
wiki page in a standard or user-definable format. [add blog feed to main
page?]
- Widgets: allows the creation of raw HTML pages that can be embedded
(similarly to templates) in normal wiki pages. [allows twitter, facebook
widgets?]
- Bugzilla: allows read-only integration with Bugzilla via the REST API
[might make bugzilla links more informative]
- Sandstone: loads css required to make vector have Mozilla (sandstone)
look and feel. [just for the feel]

Some ideas:
- an infobox for taskforces so that there's a consistent, easy to look-up
display of general info
- prevent spam, whatever it takes for this

Akshay

--
Akshay S Dinesh
https://mozillians.org/u/asdofindia

[Soumya Deb]

Quick response to Akshay, without going way offtopic:

The infra of all the Mozilla India systems and services are with me.
Abhishek Nagar has the same access, but due to limitation of time
commitments he's the backup admin (so just in case I go under a bus, the
servers will still be in safe hands :P). A bit more on this on later part.

The platform itself (wiki admin access, and hence, the content management),
is with the docs TF. More details:
http://debloper.blogspot.ca/2013/09/brace-yourselves-new-mozilla-india-is.html


The later part (not important for all):
The entire MozillaIndia infra, with about a dozen of services/subdomains,
half a dozen runtimes (from perl to node.js) are all running on a single
system. Risky as it is, I've been able to keep it up with zero
reported/recorded incident for over 3 years (may very well be a world
record, but unconfirmed).

However, it sure shouldn't be the case in two distinct ways:
1. Encapsulation of services: we should actually use different (even if
less beefy) VMs for each services, to avoid having single point of failure
for all. Containerization is a _real_ thing now as well, which it totally
wasn't back then. This will help ease the process of giving access to those
boxes to the corresponding teams/TFs as well. Which *right now* I cant:
say, to fix something on the wiki, the Doc TF having access to the main
rig, misconfigures apache, then from blog to bugzilla everything goes down.

2. Infra team (non-single-person): A carefully picked line up of lazy bums
whos prime achievement would be to *NOT HAVE TO DO* anything as the best
case scenario (ensure zero incidence), but in case anything needs their
attention they can fix it dedicatedly, even if it's 4AM. I've been planning
for a hunger-game-like infra-team selection process (but a clue-based
progressive evaluation), where anyone is welcome to participate, but
depending on their devop/infra skill levels, a handful of them eventually
attains the su access on Mozilla India servers.

A lot to be discussed on this, keep your (collective) thoughts coming (on a
different thread?)


On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 9:24 AM, Akshay S Dinesh <asdof...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Akshay S Dinesh]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 10:02 AM, Soumya Deb <debl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The entire MozillaIndia infra, with about a dozen of services/subdomains,
> half a dozen runtimes (from perl to node.js) are all running on a single
> system. Risky as it is, I've been able to keep it up with zero
> reported/recorded incident for over 3 years (may very well be a world
> record, but unconfirmed).

I want to prick you by saying that this risky set up has led to the
wiki being in "read-only" mode for the last two months which would
count as a reported incident had a bug been filed for that :P

Can you send that information about server upgrades which we discussed
about, so that everyone gets to know why this is stalling? Also some
kind of a date around which we'd be back running?

[Soumya Deb]

0. bugz.mozillaindia.org

1. Is it read-only? Or on-demand write permission (after evaluation)? I
think it's the later (cause I can - just did... lulz), and has been to
fight spam. It should've been obvious on the wiki's front page that "TO
EDIT THE WIKI, YOU NEED TO REQUEST EDIT ACCESS BY POKING THE ADMIN'S RIBS
WITH A STICK MADE OF IRONWOOD BRANCHES". But sadly, that has never been the
case either. Also, it's not an infra issue, just a platform issue (and
platform owner/admin not caring about it as much as it should have been).

On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 3:52 AM, Akshay S Dinesh <asdof...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Soumya Deb]

Oh oh... and fwiw, I had to write teh PHP to implement this edit access on
request thingy.
(In short: read only access to "all" users; have a separate "canedit"
users; a frontend to update users to enable "canedit";)

It's not a bug, it's a feature. xD

[Akshay S Dinesh]

I'm afraid that's not the "read-only" I meant. How much sense does it
make to edit a wiki after it has been manually backed up to Google
Drive? Or, should all editing now be repeated on Google Drive too?
What was the point of this exercise altogether?

> Soumya Deb
> http://debs.io/
> Twitter: @Debloper
> Open Source Evangelist

[Soumya Deb]

I don't get it either.

Would love to discuss... but separate your problem(s) first.

Some of those problems are because of "Human Centered Design" accommodating
their characteristic weirdness and imperfection. I've also received calls
from people to confirm they've got my text. I think these sorta things
usual for that species.

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 6:17 PM, Akshay S Dinesh <asdof...@gmail.com>

[Akshay S Dinesh]

Deb,

I think you've misunderstood what I am saying. There's no doubt that
the wiki can be edited by anyone who gets permission. And it's good
that you did spend your time in developing the front-end to canedit.
That's not what I'm talking about.

I've filed a bug [0] so that you understand.

0: http://bugz.mozillaindia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31

[Priyanka Nag]

Hey Akshay,

I am extremely sorry that the entire process of having a new wiki instance
for Mozilla India is taking way longer than I had initially expected. My
initial plan was to have all the important content backed up, pause all
edits on the current wiki instance, let the technical task-force complete
the migration process (as far as I know, implement a new wiki instance was
the plan) and then bring back all the backed up content to the new wiki.
Only when the entire process was complete, did I want others to continue
updating the wiki.

I was expecting the migration to have happened by now. I am also to be
blamed here, that I didn't do all the necessary followups with the
technical team to speed this process up. My apologies for that.

@Deb, any idea by when can we expect the migration process to be completed?
Accordingly, the documentation task-force can proceed with their further
plans.

[Soumya Deb]

Now that we have a bug for this, let's take the discussion there, if makes
sense: http://bugz.mozillaindia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31#c1

Priyanka,

As mentioned in the bug comment, can you generalize the spam articles in
such a way, they can be chucked from the database? That'll help... (DELETE
* from posts where posts.user = "tr0ll")

In that case, we can simply clean the DB, set up a weekly backup to S3 and
(whenever the new infra is ready (no hard timeline yet)) it can be
migrated/replicated without much manual intervention.

Backing up wiki articles in Google Docs and then having to put them back in
even sounds painful to me (even if it's just one article). :(

[Priyanka Nag]

Thank you so much for taking care of this @Deb 😊