Dave wrote:It doesn't matter. Rich thinks I'd be "taking on too much."
That's a politically correct insult of the highest order.
I currently run a hiking group with 2,615 members, which has a wiki with 16 active and 5 inactive editors. I also am a WRT coder. A small part of a big team, but something like 15,000,000 installs.
You get one serious illness and make one bad business decision and there's always someone waiting to remind you what a failure you are, four years later.
If you want to take on the Wiki - feel free - I can provide you with the existing code and the latest database so you can just copy it all over onto your server - it is just that i know how much work it is and you already have several projects on the go...
The big issue is that ONE person cannot do it on their own - there is a distinct lack of willing hands to keep adding stuff to the Wiki (as I said, as soon as you host it there is a perception that you will be responsible for maintaining it and adding the large amount of information which is still missing)...
It makes a lot of sense for the Wiki url to be wiki.sinclairql.com or wiki.sinclairql.net - Urs owns sinclairql.net (but does not have time to sort out his existing site) - do you still own sinclairql.com?
There are the following steps required so far as I can see:
a) Decide on what Wiki engine to use. For simplicity you could just copy the existing Wiki engine over and run that.
b) Decide on the new URL to be used for the Wiki
c) Decide on who will be responsible as the admin for the Wiki
d) Decide on who will pay for the domain name renewal and hosting costs. Quanta have offered to put some space aside on their server, but that might not be suitable if one of the suggested URLs above is used.
Assuming you continue to use WiClear...
e) Write a routine to update the SQL database, re-writing all references from
www.rwapadventures.com/ql_wiki/ to the new url
f) Write a routine to find all of the JPG / PNG and GIF images referenced in the database (they should all be hosted within
www.rwapadventures.com/images/ (or sub-directories), but I cannot guarantee that. Update all of the references to a suitable folder on the new server. Copy the images over from my server so that I can remove them and free up hosting space.
If you want to use MediaWiki or similar....
g) Write a routine to crawl the QL WIki and extract all of the information from each page and insert it into a database format suitable for MediaWiki
h) The alternative would be to write an extraction routine to convert the database directly - alas there is no real information on the WiClear database format.
i) Potentially write a routine to automatically update the layout of each page in the new database to make it reasonable for navigation / readability etc...
j) Change my .htacess file so that any references to
www.rwapadventures.com/ql_wiki/index.php?xxxxx get redirected to newurl/index.php?xxxxx . Unfortunately, this is necessary because of the large number of links to the QL Wiki on the internet - although someone might find time to start notifying these website owners to start replacing their links
k) Find lots of willing hands to continue updating the Wiki to enter the masses of missing information about publishers, programs etc - perhaps concentrating first on the many programs which have been made freeware / public domain over the past few years and are available through Dilwyn's site.
There are a couple of people who have asked for the database in the past (which I uploaded to these forums), so it would be worth seeing if they have managed to get anywhere with extracting / converting the data already.
Have I missed anything?