Category: Wiki

Wiki updated!

As we mentioned yesterday, the wiki was read-only for a period today as we performed some much-needed upgrades. The new wiki is now live on http://wiki.musicbrainz.org and testing is encouraged to make sure we didn’t miss anything! It isn’t available as of this writing because a DNS change is required, but the old wiki will remain available at http://oldwiki.musicbrainz.org for some period of time, in a read-only state.

The new wiki has a few changes:

  1. You’ll see that the style has changed; instead of maintaining our own complete MediaWiki skin, we’re now just doing some modifications on top of the provided monobook skin.
  2. Login is now required to edit pages, partly as a spam-mitigation measure and partly because people were often editing without logging in, which made it hard to track down who exactly changed a page.
  3. The MediaWiki API should now be accessible, from http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/api.php.
  4. Finally, A few extensions have shuffled around and been updated as well; the full details are available on http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Special:Version.

If you find mistakes in our setup, please contact me: ‘ianmcorvidae’ on the MusicBrainz site and on IRC, and @musicbrainz.org via email; or, file a ticket on http://tickets.musicbrainz.org (under MusicBrainz Hosting, assign to “Ian McEwen”).

Wiki read-only period tomorrow, September 7

Our wiki’s been needing an upgrade for some time, and we’re ready to make the switchover. However, as you may imagine, upgrading from MediaWiki 1.11.2 to 1.19.2 isn’t a trifling matter (though kudos to the MediaWiki team for it even being possible in one step!), so we’ll need a few hours to run upgrade scripts and migrate servers (though we’ve worked to make it as quick as possible). The wiki will be available during this time, but will be read-only until the switchover is complete.

The read-only window for the upgrade will start at 15:30 PDT/MST, or 22:30 UTC. The wiki will be back, shiny and new, sometime 1.5-3 hours later, presuming everything goes according to plan.

Thanks for your understanding, and hopefully you’ll agree the new wiki is much improved!

MusicBrainz Summit 10 Wrapup

We’ve just finished our 10th MusicBrainz Summit, this time held in Nürnberg, Germany. It was a great success, with a number of participants and a lot of discussion! This time, we’ve managed to note all the discussions. So, if you missed the summit and want to catch up on what we talked about, head over to our wiki page with the summit notes, which contains a summary of just about everything we mentioned.

Thanks to everyone who came, and bring on the next summit!

Wiki Migration

Today’s the day – our wiki is being migrated to MediaWiki.  The old “moin” wiki is now read-only (and will remain so, at least for a few months), and is available on oldwiki.musicbrainz.org.  The new wiki, once all the data has been migrated across, will be at the usual address.

As soon as the migration is complete, I’ll switch wiki.musicbrainz.org over to point to MediaWiki.

Unfortunately it won’t be possible to also migrate the user accounts from moin to mediawiki, so regrettably this means that once mediawiki us up, you’ll have to re-create your accounts.  Sorry about that.

Update: the switch has been made – if you have any questions to ask or problems to report about this, please see the WikiMigration page.  Thanks!

Performance problems on the Wiki

I’ve had to disable the “FullSearch” moin macro, at least for now – far too many pages were using it, sometimes multiple times on the same page, and each invocation of FullSearch is rather expensive. The result was that the wiki server – which also runs the mailing lists and various other important things – … Continue reading “Performance problems on the Wiki”

I’ve had to disable the “FullSearch” moin macro, at least for now – far too many pages were using it, sometimes multiple times on the same page, and each invocation of FullSearch is rather expensive. The result was that the wiki server – which also runs the mailing lists and various other important things – was dying a death.

I don’t know why this has only just started being a problem, because it looks like most of those uses of FullSearch have been in place for a while. But, for whatever reason, it’s a problem now, and the quick fix to stop the server crashing is to disable the macro. Sorry 😦

A big Thank You!

I just wanted to offer a HUGE thank you to g0llum a.k.a. Keschte for all the tedious work he did in updating a number of pages (well over 100) to reflect the change in verbiage from “album” to “release” and “moderate” to “edit”. This was very time consuming work and he tackled this project along … Continue reading “A big Thank You!”

I just wanted to offer a HUGE thank you to g0llum a.k.a. Keschte for all the tedious work he did in updating a number of pages (well over 100) to reflect the change in verbiage from “album” to “release” and “moderate” to “edit”. This was very time consuming work and he tackled this project along with all of his other efforts including making our site comply with web standards. If you see him on IRC be sure to tell him thanks and give him a big virtual hug.

I’d also like to thank MRudat for also being a busy bee and making lots of little edits and interwingling pages. Every little bit helps.

To everyone else contributing, thank you.

wolfsong

Slowly updating the Documentation

Alex has been copying the documentation from the website into the Wiki. The idea behind this is that the documentation on the website is partially dated and structured in a way that does not reflect the way new users come to MusicBrainz any more. I have now joined him in his effort of RestructuringTheDocumentation. This … Continue reading “Slowly updating the Documentation”

Alex has been copying the documentation from the website into the Wiki. The idea behind this is that the documentation on the website is partially dated and structured in a way that does not reflect the way new users come to MusicBrainz any more.

I have now joined him in his effort of RestructuringTheDocumentation. This is the second restructuring that this Wiki experiences (the first was the general RestructuringTheWiki).

Continue reading “Slowly updating the Documentation”