SWILwiki
From SWILwiki
This is the SWILwiki. It's a wiki run by SWIL. It has history.
| Table of contents |
Why does SWIL need a wiki?
- To keep the Panic Book and Pterodactyl Hunt pages in an easily accessible, easily updateable format.
- To record oral history (lore) for posterity. (This is arguably a bad thing, depending on how much you like your oral history to stay oral.)
SWILwiki Mk. I
At some point in time, wikis became popular. During the 2003-2004 school year, they were popular enough that SWIL current students started discussing the idea of having a wiki for SWIL. This was mostly Blake's pet idea, encouraged by role models like Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) and Harvey Mudd's FunWiki (http://www3.hmc.edu/~rgarfinkel/funwiki/index.cgi), as well as the fact that the SCCS was just as idly toying with the idea of installing wiki software. The presidents were generally approving or apathetic, and Jillian at some point poked the SCCS to find out if they'd installed wiki software yet, and was repeatedly told that they were going to.
During the summer of 2004, Blake (who was in New Mexico at the time) managed to poke the SCCS sufficiently hard that they gave him a SWILwiki, and even let him into the relevant SWIL group on SCCS so he could configure it. This was all done with implicit backing from the presidents, who were nonetheless surprised to discover that the much-talked-about SWILwiki suddenly existed. "SWILwiki Mk. 1", as the FrontPage called it, went live on June 4, 2004.
The new wiki was exciting, it was summer, and we were bored. The primary contributors to the wiki over that first summer were Blake Setlow, ArthurChu, Jillian Waldman, and Michael Noda, although others contributed as well. Blake and Jillian had a (relatively minor) spat over whose wiki it was anyway. Blake didn't want the wiki to have a Sandbox. Noda didn't want the wiki to use CamelCase, since Wikipedia doesn't. Jillian was just mad at Blake for "going over her head." Eventually everything settled down. Early content added to the wiki included an exhaustive list of SWIL "in-jokes" and other current lore, a few userpages, and monster pages for the Pterodactyl Hunt. Users were encouraged to create login accounts, and to add their contact info to the "SwilPeople" page, but logins weren't required.
Jillian had long been convinced that the most important thing that should be on a SWILwiki were instructions for running things in SWIL, including Ben's proposed-but-never-implemented Book of the Dactyl, and Chaos's top-secret, unlinked, in-LateX Quasi-official guide to running SWIL. She believed that secrecy and authority were less important than getting the information on-line and up-to-date. She managed to convince the alums (who were skeptical of this newfangled wiki-thing) of this enough that on June 15, Chaos started adding text from the Panic Book to the wiki. Panic Book pages were created as subpages of a page called "The Panic Book," which meant that their page names were "The Panic Book/The Massacre", etc.
We told the chat list about the wiki sometime later in June.
Wikiing continued happily on the wiki for some time. Every so often, there'd be a spam post, and someone would delete it, and it would be good. Jillian, because she has an obsessive nature, put a lot of words manually into MoinMoin's local dictionary, so that the spell check would work. The wiki grew in size and popularity, at least among those who cared. Some of the alumni got over their wiki-fear. Some of the '08 prefrosh even looked at it over the summer.
SWILwiki Mk. II
At the beginning of February, 2005, the SWILwiki started getting badly spammed by bots, primarily with links to porn and offshore pharmacies. Wikis are apparently good places to put links to porn because pages are strongly linked to each other, and the fact that they're freely editable by anyone works against them. The presidents panicked about this slightly, deleted a lot of spam edits, and emailed the SCCS to see what could be done. The fact that, not only did the then-current version of MoinMoin not have spam filters, but it also didn't allow people to "revert" pages, was beginning to be a problem.
After prodding, the SCCS solved the problem by upgrading to MoinMoin Release 1.3 (http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MoinMoinRelease1.3), which had some kind of spam filters, plus the abilities to revert pages, look at page histories, and subscribe to pages so that one received email updates when the pages were edited. (The latter feature wasn't enabled until May, though, at which point Jillian subscribed to every page in the wiki.)
The SWILwiki was used with great success in coordinating the 2005 SWIL Reunion/Alumni Weekend, which increased its visibility to alumni.
We later began to wonder if it would be possible to move the wiki to some more straightforward URL than wiki.sccs.swarthmore.edu/swil/. In April we asked Josh (who owned the swil.org domain) and the SCCS (who hosted the wiki) if it would be possible to set up virtual hosting for it at wiki.swil.org. The SCCS told us that, in principle, it would be fine, because they were already hosting a page at www.swil.org, but they wanted to discuss what their official policy was on virtual hosting before changing anything, which they probably wouldn't get around to until after the summer. We set up a redirect from swil.org to the wiki and waited.
SWILwiki Mk. III
Some other things were bothering us about the current incarnation of the SWILwiki as well. For instance, there was the fact that the SCCS couldn't upgrade their PHP because they were running Debian and waiting for Sarge to be released, and then because they hadn't installed Sarge. Without the newer version of PHP, MoinMoin 1.3 was crippled -- in particular, some of its nicer features, like Access Control Lists (ACLs), which would have let us set lists of users who were allowed to edit certain pages, were disabled. Jillian was very much in favor of requiring everyone to log in in order to edit the wiki, since everyone in SWIL knows each other (or ought to), and people should be responsible for/credited with their edits. Moin Moin without ACLs couldn't do this. There was also the MoinMoin wiki's annoying tendency to crash Mozilla Firefox (especially on a Mac), so people kept losing their work.
Lurking in the back of everyone's head was the fact that, when we'd thought about getting a wiki in the first place, one of the options we'd considered (as had the SCCS) had been MediaWiki, the software Wikipedia runs with, but we hadn't been able to use it because we were using an old version of PHP and it required the newer one.
When in June of 2005, Josh and Chaos decided to get real, professionally managed, offsite hosting for their websites and mailing lists, SWIL (mostly Jillian) decided to take Josh up on his previous offer to move the SWILwiki off of SCCS to his servers. The wiki mailing list was also created at this time. The wiki that was installed on the new servers (http://www.swarpa.net) on September 18, 2005 used MediaWiki, not MoinMoin. We talked about writing a script to move content over from the old wiki, but ended up doing it all manually. The document you're looking at now is the result of that migration.
MoinMoin vs. MediaWiki
| MoinMoin | MediaWiki |
|---|---|
| has boring page layout | has pretty, professional-looking monobook skin |
| has transparent, tweakable python code | uses lots of convoluted and opaque PHP |
| no special pages | links to talk pages at the top of every page, plus user pages, and other special namespaces |
| has extensive, but not necessarily up-to-date on-line documentation, much of which is written for sysadmins | has very little documentation for adminning or developing MediaWiki, but lots for editing wikis |
| has CamelCase, which is easy, but some people hate | avoided CamelCase for links |
| uses non-Wikipedia markup | uses Wikipedia markup |
| doesn't support any html tags | supports most html tags |
| ridiculously insecure -- anyone who can read the directory on SCCS can fake a login as anyone else | buries this in a database Jillian still can't figure out how to directly read |
| leaky spam filters | haven't tried them |
| allows restricted edit access to pages by listing names (of people or groups) in the top of the pages when they're created (ACLs) | allows access to be restricted to no one, logged-in users, or all users |
| no admins or special users, other than people in the SWIL group on SCCS | admins, who can block people and freeze pages |
| has a dictionary and spell-check, even if Jillian had to add it manually | has a blank "commonly misspelled words page" |
| FortuneCookies produces a random Quote at the top of RecentChanges | Was eventually given a similar function after much hassle and some hacking by Jillian |
| optionally sends emails when "subscribed" pages are updated | keeps a watchlist for each user, but we'd have to enable an extension (enotif (http://www.wikipage.org/wikinaut/index.php/Enotif)) to actually send email notifications to users |
| the internet is full of minor, somewhat kludgy patches and hacks for admins | the internet is full of extensions, most of which are highly specialized and a royal pain to install, but some of which are really pretty, like LaTeX support. |
| nice search function within titles or text; if you type in a nonexistent page name it gives you a choice between creating a new page and going to a page with a similar name | annoying search function |
| has "templates", which are blank pages you use as a framework for new pages | has awesome templates you can include in any page |
