Upgrading MediaWiki

[KhaledHammouda]

The current version of the wiki is 1.18, which is 12 years old. Are there any plans to upgrade to the latest MediaWiki version (currently 1.39 or 1.40)?

Some of the major features introduced since 1.18 are:

• VisualEditor for WYSIWYG editing
• MobileFrontend for better mobile experience
• MediaViewer for viewing images directly on wiki pages
• Flow (Structured Discussions) for threaded discussions
• Echo for notifications about various events
• Content Translation

Other notable features:

• Page Previews for link previews when hovering over links
• Advanced search capabilities, including search suggestions
• Parsoid: an HTML5 based wiki parser for better handling of complex wiki markup
• New extension registration system for streamlined extension registration

And many others. Isn't it time to consider an upgrade to bring the wiki to the modern age?

[nullplan]

The only one who could affect any change of that sort (switching to something completely different has also been suggested before) is chase, the server admin. Everyone else here lacks the rights to do it. And chase basically only appears when there is major technical trouble here, then he fixes it, and then he goes into year-long hibernation or whatever it is that he does. In short, he's the person you need to convince, and he's quite hard to reach. Good luck!

[xtex]

ahhhh now the version in use is even older, and MW 1.41 is released,,,,
really loved new features. btw, this forum is old, too.

[lukflug]

One important thing that is missing are footnotes, which are especially useful for references. I have considered making more substantial contributions to the wiki, but the lack of footnotes is kind of a dealbreaker for me personally. I guess that's unfortunately unlikely to change any time soon ...

[lukflug]

So I've decided to take matters into my own hands: there's now a fork of the OSDev wiki at miraheze.org, with a modern MediaWiki version, proper anti-vandalism tools (relevant, since recently there's been some vandalism), and probably way less security vulnerabilities. The full revision history of all pages were preserved. Most of the changes I've made so far, were to ensure that it was clear that this is a fork of the OSDev.org wiki, but isn't officially endorsed by OSDev.org or anything. A nice thing about Miraheze is their ManageWiki interface, which means you can do most configuration in the browser and without having to SSH into some server. This means anyone in the Bureaucrat group can do those things, without everything relying on a single person, who might potentially become very inactive.

P.S: Almost forgot to include the link: https://osdev.miraheze.org/.

Update: The wiki can now be accessed via: https://osdev.wiki/.

[YDeeps1]

It would be great if the original owner could make these changes, but it is what it is.
I get the owner might not have time to deal with this, but it would be nice if someone more active was given access to make these kinds of changes and help keep these resources more modern.

[chase]

The wiki and forums along with database, OS, etc have all been updated to new versions. The upgrade actually happened almost a week ago but I've been reviewing and adding extensions and I'm close to happy with it.

The wiki is now running 1.39 which is the latest LTS version. I'll be keeping the wiki on a supported LTS version going forward.

There are a ton of other changes, osdev.org is running on a new host, an Ampere ARM compute instance running Ubuntu. I've been really impressed at how far Linux on ARM has come.

Regarding bot, spam and vandalism prevention, the current setup includes:

• Cloudflare protection
• Cloudflare human verification for "Special" pages (prevents bots from logging into the wiki)
• Cloudflare offline support to continue serving wiki pages in the event of an outage
• mod_remoteip for Cloudflare so that banning by ip addresses work along with Extension:CheckUser so that wiki sysops can identify the ip addresses of spammers.
• https://www.stopforumspam.com/ integration on both the forums and the wiki to prevent known spammers
• Wiki authors must join the phpBB forum wiki group but the group is open enrollment. This functions more as a captcha than anything else. Having a non-standard signup process is a great spam prevention measure.
• A moderation system on the wiki. Similar to the forum where a new user's post must be approved, the first couple of edits by a user on the wiki go into a moderation queue.
• Wiki moderators are automatically nominated based on contributions to the wiki.
• SpamBlacklist configured with both the En Wikipedia and Meta-Wiki blacklists.
• $wgSpamRegex configured to block wiki page edits for certain phrases.
• Forum registration requires email verification but I've switched from self-hosted smtp to an email delivery service to improve upon the deliverability of the emails for the forum and wiki.

Regarding wiki forks, I've hosted osdev.org for 20 years, the current wiki for 18 years. I plan on hosting the forums and wiki for another 20 years.

I use Facebook, Reddit, IRC, Slack, Discord, etc but locking away valuable knowledge in information silos is a worrying trend. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/com ... e_now_its/ Yes, the irony of that discussion being on Reddit isn't lost to me.

And if you hadn't heard, Miraheze (wiki hosting) barely survived a shutdown last year. I think the best way to preserve knowledge is to host it yourself AND encourage others to as well. To that end I've scheduled weekly XML dumps of the OSDev wiki which are available at https://files.osdev.org/osdev-wiki.xml.gz. Fork away! If you do fork, consider contributing back upstream.

[JackScott]

Just wanted to say a quick thankyou to Chase for all you do hosting the site! It's much appreciated.

[StudlyCaps]

Just wanted to say a quick thankyou to Chase for all you do hosting the site! It's much appreciated.

I second this, even though he isn't the most active, he always does the right thing for the community when it needs doing. Thanks Chase!

[YDeeps1]

Really glad to see this!