All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXVII

[Labster]

Are you talking about Meta on WikiTide or Meta on Miraheze?

I think you could probably become a steward on either service, but you should really think long and hard before doing it, because of what working with that side would do to your reputation.

https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Pol...07-Minutes

Okay, that's kind of helpful to understand what's going on, but doesn't really explain why so many people are suddenly quitting.  There's definitely been a break in the community, which I don't really understand because I wasn't taking part.  But a lot of people have left, and many others are requesting deletion of all data on Miraheze.  They currently have one steward, one SRE, two members of the board, and about six months of runway. I was going to start volunteering again, and then this happened.

At least, when a director makes a motion to dissolve the company, I can safely say that bridges have been burnt.

[robkelk]

Is the director who made the motion to dissolve the company still with Miraheze, migrated to WikiTide, or gone from both groups? The answer to that affects my answer to your question.

As for community splits, I go through something similar after every general election. Meet the new boss, now get back to work doing what I've been doing for a couple of decades. Not exactly the same as this case, I know, but from an end-user point of view it may as well be.

In this case, all I care about is who's best-able to provide the service that I expect from a wiki farm... and if they're equally able, then why migrate?

EDIT: And I see Miraheze's CVT ("Trust & Safety") is down to one person. Promotion to Steward is a no-go there until the CVT gets its numbers back up. I can't find any web presence for WikiTide yet.

[Labster]

Is the director who made the motion to dissolve the company still with Miraheze, migrated to WikiTide, or gone from both groups? The answer to that affects my answer to your question.

He made the motion, and then the meeting immediately adjourned. He then resigned and started WikiTide, bought the domain name, and put up the servers.

Honestly as I read these meeting minutes I'm unimpressed by all of the behavior here. And the fact that the board has three members, now two members, out of a theoretical nine, with no representatives for users or staff. And the fact that they didn't have a meeting for five months, and only met then to let everything explode.

One person is President/Secretary/Treasurer (and was before all of this)? That's not even legal in the U.S., though I assume as an attorney he's not doing it wrong for the U.K.

As for community splits, I go through something similar after every general election. Meet the new boss, now get back to work doing what I've been doing for a couple of decades. Not exactly the same as this case, I know, but from an end-user point of view it may as well be.

In this case, all I care about is who's best-able to provide the service that I expect from a wiki farm... and if they're equally able, then why migrate?

EDIT: And I see Miraheze's CVT ("Trust & Safety") is down to one person. Promotion to Steward is a no-go there until the CVT gets its numbers back up. I can't find any web presence for WikiTide yet.

At this point I think most/all appointments would come directly from the board, as it's basically emergency time.

[robkelk]

Is the director who made the motion to dissolve the company still with Miraheze, migrated to WikiTide, or gone from both groups? The answer to that affects my answer to your question.

He made the motion, and then the meeting immediately adjourned.  He then resigned and started WikiTide, bought the domain name, and put up the servers.

Not just migrated to WikiTide, but founded WikiTide once he realized he wasn't going to have everything his own way at Miraheze. I'm reminded of Doc Corless here.

(Aside: How is DC's fork of the wiki doing, by the way? Does anybody know? For obvious reasons, I don't annoy him with my presence there.)

Honestly as I read these meeting minutes I'm unimpressed by all of the behavior here.  And the fact that the board has three members, now two members, out of a theoretical nine, with no representatives for users or staff.  And the fact that they didn't have a meeting for five months, and only met then to let everything explode.

One person is President/Secretary/Treasurer (and was before all of this)?  That's not even legal in the U.S., though I assume as an attorney he's not doing it wrong for the U.K.

Plenty of amateurs doing what they can but forgetting to present their best faces, yeah.

And a Director holding more than one Officer position is also of questionable legality in Canada. But the UK isn't Canada. It's definitely a perceived conflict of interest even if it is legal: who countersigns the cheques to make sure they're going where they're supposed to? The financials are currently only as good as that one director's word (which, them being a lawyer, is presumed to be good, I'll grant).

As for meetings, depending on how the articles of incorporation are phrased, they might not have quorum for anything other than a by-election to fill those empty seats with people to finish the original directors' terms. I'd have to read the incorporation document... which in a quick search doesn't appear to be available. And I'd have to read the articles of incorporation to know how often they are legally required to meet -- it's possible that it could be as rarely as once annually. That doesn't preclude more frequent meetings, of course (and I prefer quarterly or monthly for a business that size).

As for community splits, I go through something similar after every general election. Meet the new boss, now get back to work doing what I've been doing for a couple of decades. Not exactly the same as this case, I know, but from an end-user point of view it may as well be.

In this case, all I care about is who's best-able to provide the service that I expect from a wiki farm... and if they're equally able, then why migrate?

EDIT: And I see Miraheze's CVT ("Trust & Safety") is down to one person. Promotion to Steward is a no-go there until the CVT gets its numbers back up. I can't find any web presence for WikiTide yet.

At this point I think most/all appointments would come directly from the board, as it's basically emergency time.

Yeah. I don't know whether I want to put my name forward, though -- things are ramping up at work right now.

[Labster]

Is the director who made the motion to dissolve the company still with Miraheze, migrated to WikiTide, or gone from both groups? The answer to that affects my answer to your question.

He made the motion, and then the meeting immediately adjourned.  He then resigned and started WikiTide, bought the domain name, and put up the servers.

Not just migrated to WikiTide, but founded WikiTide once he realized he wasn't going to have everything his own way at Miraheze. I'm reminded of Doc Corless here.

Really? I was thinking it reminded me of myself and Bob and Geth, who founded a new wiki project when TV Tropes turned against their community.

There are a lot of quit, and I really don't know the situation enough to characterize it well. It could be very much the one, or very much the other, or both situations.

[robkelk]

Is the director who made the motion to dissolve the company still with Miraheze, migrated to WikiTide, or gone from both groups? The answer to that affects my answer to your question.

He made the motion, and then the meeting immediately adjourned.  He then resigned and started WikiTide, bought the domain name, and put up the servers.

Not just migrated to WikiTide, but founded WikiTide once he realized he wasn't going to have everything his own way at Miraheze. I'm reminded of Doc Corless here.

Really? I was thinking it reminded me of myself and Bob and Geth, who founded a new wiki project when TV Tropes turned against their community.

There are a lot of quit, and I really don't know the situation enough to characterize it well. It could be very much the one, or very much the other, or both situations.

Yeah, there's that too. Looking in from the outside doesn't give a clear view.

[GethN7]

Gentlemen, I'm just as confused by this bizarre series of events as you all are. I would advise we do the following.

Get backups of our content ASAP, ideally backed up somewhere reasonably permanent like Archive.org

Second, as for VisualEditor, it's become a millstone around our editing necks because it breaks far too much. Outside of talk page areas, it should be shunted off for all actual content editing spaces.

Third, I admit I'm out of my depth on the legal crap that just exploded on us. Whatever the case, I'll happily accede to the rest of your decisions on this, this is clearly your field, not mine.

[robkelk]

I'm having a sub-par day, so I don't trust my own judgment. Are some of the additions in this set of edits too far into "bashing tropes you don't like"?

[GethN7]

I'm having a sub-par day, so I don't trust my own judgment. Are some of the additions in this set of edits too far into "bashing tropes you don't like"?

Might want a second from someone besides me, but a Just for Fun page, I'm inclined to give it a pass, the page is about negativity in the name of Rule of Funny.

[Bob Schroeck]

I agree with Geth. I've been watching Just a 1itt1e bit further's edits to this page for some weeks now, and I don't think anything's gone too far. Yet.

[robkelk]

GethN7, Labster, and I just finished an almost-hour-long discussion about the state of affairs at our wiki host, and how that affects us.

We've decided on two things that directly affect our wiki.

First, considering that the newest backup of the wiki that we can find is over two years old, we need a newer backup. Labster's going to make that happen.

Second, there's no pressing need to change our current hosting status or our current host. Staying put for the short term doesn't set any precedents one way or the other, it's just us taking the time to examine our options. We're going to watch what happens at both Miraheze and WikiTide, and have another discussion in a month. (Unless one wiki farm or the other disintegrates, in which case the decision is made for us.)

[robkelk]

In another matter, eight hours into the discussion about turning off Visual Editor and the feedback has been completely positive. But we haven't heard from very many people yet.

[robkelk]

A suggestion to all mods: If anybody asks us when (or whether) we're going to be migrating ATT from Miraheze to WikiTide, we tell them that we'll need to read WikiTide's Terms of Use before we make a decision.

Yes, I know that as of this posting the page says "Coming soon... " If they aren't ready to show people the contract, then they aren't ready for clients.

[Bob Schroeck]

Cult classics through "F" have been reviewed.

[robkelk]

Just found something else that Flow breaks.

This link is straight off the Recent Changes list. It should show the differences between a discussion that Looney Toons posted to. Instead, it shows the entire discussion without marking what has been changed.

If we do end up migrating the wiki somewhere, can we not use Flow, please? There are plenty of other options for structured talk-page discussions that actually work with the rest of MediaWiki.

[GethN7]

Just found something else that Flow breaks.

This link is straight off the Recent Changes list. It should show the differences between a discussion that Looney Toons posted to. Instead, it shows the entire discussion without marking what has been changed.

If we do end up migrating the wiki somewhere, can we not use Flow, please? There are plenty of other options for structured talk-page discussions that actually work with the rest of MediaWiki.

Rob, that's an issue with RC, NOT Flow

Flow proper links referencing specific posts look like this:

https://allthetropes.org/w/index.php?tit...q9lxttix1i

The RC reads the talk page like it would a stock talk page, hence the issue you got. The problem is that the RecentChanges links do not account for the fact Flow, in order to avoid page corruption (so things can be reverted to a stock page later with minimal hassle), stores all conversations in a different format in their own database tables, which also makes uninstalling and upgrading much less painful

What you linked is a quirk of sourcing diffs from RC. You need to right click a post on a Flow board topic, get the Permalink, and link that, that will lead to a specific post.

[Labster]

Yeah, I mean, with curid=0&oldid=0 in the link I would expect to see no changes.

I tried to download the 2 year old backup of ATT in DataDump, but for "some reason" the download would stop every 300 seconds. But I kept clicking resume in the browser, and it downloaded eventually. And then I tried to generate a new backup, twice. It failed both times. And then I looked at the dump I already had, and found that it was corrupted, and only extracted to a fraction of the size of the full content (and included only images, no wiki content). But to create a new dump I had to delete the old dump... so we are now worse than when we started in backups.

[robkelk]

Just found something else that Flow breaks.

This link is straight off the Recent Changes list. It should show the differences between a discussion that Looney Toons posted to. Instead, it shows the entire discussion without marking what has been changed.

If we do end up migrating the wiki somewhere, can we not use Flow, please? There are plenty of other options for structured talk-page discussions that actually work with the rest of MediaWiki.

Rob, that's an issue with RC, NOT Flow

Flow proper links referencing specific posts look like this:

https://allthetropes.org/w/index.php?tit...q9lxttix1i

The RC reads the talk page like it would a stock talk page, hence the issue you got. The problem is that the RecentChanges links do not account for the fact Flow, in order to avoid page corruption (so things can be reverted to a stock page later with minimal hassle), stores all conversations in a different format in their own database tables, which also makes uninstalling and upgrading much less painful

What you linked is a quirk of sourcing diffs from RC. You need to right click a post on a Flow board topic, get the Permalink, and link that, that will lead to a specific post.

I don't care what it's an issue with. It's broken.

I also don't want the link to the post. I want the link to the diff.

[GethN7]

Just found something else that Flow breaks.

This link is straight off the Recent Changes list. It should show the differences between a discussion that Looney Toons posted to. Instead, it shows the entire discussion without marking what has been changed.

If we do end up migrating the wiki somewhere, can we not use Flow, please? There are plenty of other options for structured talk-page discussions that actually work with the rest of MediaWiki.

Rob, that's an issue with RC, NOT Flow

Flow proper links referencing specific posts look like this:

https://allthetropes.org/w/index.php?tit...q9lxttix1i

The RC reads the talk page like it would a stock talk page, hence the issue you got. The problem is that the RecentChanges links do not account for the fact Flow, in order to avoid page corruption (so things can be reverted to a stock page later with minimal hassle), stores all conversations in a different format in their own database tables, which also makes uninstalling and upgrading much less painful

What you linked is a quirk of sourcing diffs from RC. You need to right click a post on a Flow board topic, get the Permalink, and link that, that will lead to a specific post.

I don't care what it's an issue with. It's broken.

I also don't want the link to the post. I want the link to the diff.

Rob, and I speak with my MediaWiki user hat on, that does not, by any means, mean that MW is broken. At worst, it means, the Flow devs may need to add an alias hook to RC so that proper links to specific posts are made by Recent Changes, but the fact it's not loading the specific link and still brings upon the page proper means that at least the stock behavior for MediaWiki is still working as it should.

If this bothers you still, I suggest filing a ticket with the WMF Phabricator to address this, that would be more helpful to resolve this to your satisfaction.

[Labster]

45 edits have been made on visual editor in the last 60 days by 13 users:

Bauerbach
GalaxySagi777
HelljmprRookie
Ajacraig2011
Batzulger
Beta Log 86
STFilmmaker
Puterboy1
Severedblock695
Josh6243
Zierin705
ThunderKat
Kuma

GalaxySagi777 has 14 of those edits, ~30%. Does someone want to ping these folks to see if they're worried about losing Visual Editor? I'm not sure who of any of these have been talked to, switched, or banned.

[Bob Schroeck]

Done.

[Labster]

Miraheze is dead. Long live WikiTide!

[SelfCloak]

(Aside: How is DC's fork of the wiki doing, by the way? Does anybody know? For obvious reasons, I don't annoy him with my presence there.)

I haven't checked The True Tropes (I'm guessing it's really inactive), but I know the ban on Complete Monsters examples was lifted in Tropedia since February last year.

btw it's been a real long time since I showed up here. Hey guys

[robkelk]

What happened?

[SelfCloak]

What happened?

I posted a cowboy emoji and it gave a "?" instead, whoops.