The Future of the QL Wiki

A place to discuss general QL issues.
Paul
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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by Paul »

Mediawiki.org says so ;)


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Dave
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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by Dave »

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.

This is now my full time job. Designing, making and selling small PCBs for retro computers, mostly to the US market, and using a bit of the profits to fund QL work, because the QL is where my heart is. Providing services to support the community, what's left of it, and hopefully re-invigorate it a bit so when people google the QL they used when they were in their 20s, there's fun and interesting things going on.

Now, I have a reflow oven to program a lead-free profile on and some QL miniplanes to assemble for orders shipping on Tuesday, and an ATX power controller to get an FCC and EU declaration of conformity. Got to have that CE mark.


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by RWAP »

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?


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Dave
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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by Dave »

It does seem that, given the small amount of data, simply cut'n'pasting it to a more mainstream system and recreating the content without porting the database would take the same or less time, and would maybe yield better/more satisfying results.

It just requires good organization at the start to make sure nothing gets skipped and the structure of the new wiki works at least as well as the current wiki.

I'd be happy to point wiki.sinclairql.com to wherever it ends up. I own the domain and will until there is no internet. It's even in my will how it will be passed on. The domain is secure.


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by RWAP »

Dave wrote:It does seem that, given the small amount of data, simply cut'n'pasting it to a more mainstream system and recreating the content without porting the database would take the same or less time, and would maybe yield better/more satisfying results.
It would probably be best to do that from the database itself - or possibly extract the wc_content table as an csv and then work on that initially.

That table has 1054 entries so that is the number of pages at present in the Wiki


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by NormanDunbar »

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've done a bit of work on that, some time back, and I'm sure that I have some notes at work. I'll hopefully be able to dig them out on Tuesday, real job permitting, and post them here.

I was hoping to spend some time and write a parser to get wiki in and "something" out. I'm just not sure what the something would be. Lunch times permitting of course!

I also need to beware of the French versions of some pages!


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Norm.


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by NormanDunbar »

I've uploaded a PDF file containing what I have worked out for this Wiki as far as the formatting is concerned.

You can download it from https://qdosmsq.dunbar-it.co.uk/downloa ... atting.pdf - enjoy.

It was my initial investigations into the formatting characters used, I was intending to write a parser to extract the data, but I've not had enough time at lunch times recently, due to family problems with my mother in laws ongoing illnesses, to get around to doing much. I still intend to write a parser, sometime, soon (maybe/hopefully) but I'd need to determine which output language we want to go on - WordPress, DokuWiki, MediaWiki, etc.

I notice that WiClear has not been updated since 2007, so I'd be wondering how many security/privacy problems it has accumulated since then?


Cheers,
Norm.


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Dave
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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by Dave »

It's almost easier to edit articles using a SQL injection attack than by registering as an editor.


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NormanDunbar
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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by NormanDunbar »

Little Bobby Tables!

https://xkcd.com/327/


Cheers,
Norm.


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by NormanDunbar »

And today's lunch break was tarting up a document on the current QL Wiki's database structure, tables, usage and whatever other information I could extract. This is now available for download by all interested parties, at :

https://qdosmsq.dunbar-it.co.uk/downloa ... tabase.pdf

Bedtime reading? It's only 9 pages!

Cheers,
Norm.


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