New subject: Setting up a multi-wiki community website

3 Feb 2015

Thank you for your thoughts! Our projects are definitely different but its
still nice to know that someone is trying to make something positive.
I will have to get help about what to do next.

Jay

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 7:10 AM, JFC Morfin &lt;jefsey(a)jefsey.com&gt; wrote:

...
  At 00:26 02/02/2015, Jay R wrote:

  I've been creating a job description for
making a non-profit ad-free
 website which will allow people to setup their own communities where they
 can work on solving problems relating to specific areas. Different tools
 will be provided to them including a custom-built task management system,
 a
 forum and a wiki.

 I am working on a similar Libre concept I call a cyberagora. Unfortunately
 in French (http://cybagora.org).
 The idea is the smartest conviality afficient support of "agoras" (cities,
 wg, communities, personal windows to the world, mathematical concept, etc.)

  The whole website will be "wiki" based i.e., people will collaboratively
  work together and edit task items which are not
Wiki pages. For example it
 may be a row in a database of another table.

 My idea is of a flexible federation of SQLite based mediawikis (as a
 start), and eventually a cloud of "intellipages" (i.e. smart independent
 json based wikipages) virtually gathered together through a DDDS (
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Delegation_Discovery_System).. This
 way I have no hosting to consider and maximum flexibility.

  Anyone can fill out a form and a new community is created along with a
  wiki
 of their own. So each community will have access to its own set of wiki
 pages. They may have 5 or 20 or 100 pages. In the long term there may be
 100's or 1000's of communities if the website is a success.  The URL of a
 wiki could be something like: en.Solveissues123.org/Community6543/Wiki
 <http://en.Solveissues.org/Community6543/Wiki>
 The issues are:
 (1) User database. I'd like to keep a common user database so people can
 login once and edit other community wikis.

 I suggest a different approach: by capacities. Can access an intellipage
 only those with the necessary capacity. They acquire the capacities through
 a DDDS service (like the DNS) for a limited duration.

  (2) Interlinking between various wiki communities
  (3) Sidebar content for each community so they
have their own navigation.
 (4) Communities may be set up in their own language so a wiki may have
 its own language.
 (5) There may be customization for aesthetics.

 OK for all of this. This is part, from my POV, of the VGN (Virtual Glocal
 Network) contextual parametring (the participating sites to a relational
 space).

 My idea is as follows:
 - the intellipages follows a common formating JSON standard.
 - they are registered by their owner in one or several relational spaces
 - these relational spaces are supported by people's VGN with their local
 global or global local constraints (like a format, verification tools,
 Quality control; langages, etc.).

  It will be like Wikia but I have to reserve the sub-domains for languages.
  I want to use Mediawiki and it will have to be
customized to a large
 extent.
 I have different options:

 1. Use one Mediawiki for the whole website (so one database). Let people
 separate their community wikis by using different page titles for example
 [[Community6543/Title of Page]]. They would have to use a similar notation
 to keep their categories separate. There will be one user database so
 that's good since anyone can edit a page from any community.
 The issue are the sidebar and other navigational links and language
 options. I could get the installation fully customized and change it so
 they need to edit [[Community6543/Sidebar]] to show their own navigation.

 2. Use one mediawiki for each community. They can all use the same user
 database ($wgSharedDB). Not sure how to manage interlinking here. Any
 other
 issues I need to think about? This may be a good solution since a
 community
 may have its own language.

 3. Use a 3rd light weight wiki software that provides basic wiki functions
 (editing, page history, diffs). Is there anything like that available or
 would it need to be created from scratch?

 This is a good question :-)
 The best would be syntaxic/use compatibility with wikipedia. So the best
 products of the personal/group wikis could be copied to wikipedia.

  A sidenote: Any general advice on how to manage the individual forum
  creation as well? I would not like to use the
talk pages as forums but
 rather an independent traditional forum for each community.

 IMHO you need everything you can findimagine (blogs, mailing list, fora,
 heuristic maps, etc.) and be totally language independent (except js as the
 bowsers' language).

  Any advice would be appreciated. Or if you know where I can get
  professional help in creating the job description
for this website let me
 know. I can then post the job at a freelancing website to have the website
 made.

 Not so easy. I would advise for each tool to look first at all the
 parameters being supported (mediawiki, wordpress, etc.) to make sure you do
 not forget any of them. Then to compare them from one tool to another and
 establish your own common parameter tables. Then review each functionality
 in a multiple tools context, to see what can be aggregated or extended.

 From there you will need to design a system architecture taking care of
 replications/security/backup/restorations and of the mix of the different
 databases (DDDS, Semantics) included. At the same time you need to imagine
 how you can make it commercial (business and non-profit alike) and support
 extensions by third parties (API).

 Then, not so much to write a job desciption, but a protocol, like an RFC.
 Then to start with a prototype, and test it. Then to add foreseen and new
 features you will have discovered from experimentation.

 Just half a cent, for a big project.
 jfc

  Jay
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Re: [MediaWiki-l] Setting up a multi-wiki community website