Wiki migration - lost content

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

On Sun, 2008-06-08 at 00:19 +0200, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
> I don't know who to contact about wiki migration issues. 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraProject:Wiki_migration_to-do 
> doesn't mention any contact.
> 
> 
> Congratulations with the wiki migration. It was 99.9% perfect. Well 
> done, no doubt about that!

Thanks to you for being willing to take responsibility for cleaning up
content; as I explain below, that is the current operating method.

> But:
> 
> Comparing https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq and 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wikiold/YumUpgradeFaq I can see that old "Tips" 
> boxes with several lines has been migrated to literally 
> "YumUpgradeFaq/code" and a couple of fragments on the talk/discussion page.
> 
> It is OK that formatting wasn't migrated 100%, but it is not acceptable 
> that content is lost. For this specific page I can fix it manually, but 
> it would be very sad if content was lost randomly all over the wiki. I 
> suggest that the scope of the problem is analyzed and an appropriate 
> solution is found. A solution compromise could be to programmatically 
> add a cleanup-request and a note with the lost content to the affected 
> pages.

Sadly, I don't see that happening unless someone else does the work.
The Infrastructure/Websites folks who worked on the migration script did
what they could in the time involved.

There are a few things going on that help mitigate your concern:

* People (wiki gardeners) are stepping through or randomly seeking pages
and cleaning them up; that helps semi-orphaned pages get at least
cleaned up.  Eventually, the vast majority of pages will get touched in
that way.

* Pages really need people who care and feed them.  If a page loses
content, but none of the page writers cared enough to notice, that page
is going to be in the state it is until a wiki gardener finds it.

* We're working on a process and tools to get each page sponsored by an
individual or group.  Content migrations are only one of the many ways a
page can be broken, all of the others are done by people editing the
page for various reasons, and only an actual sponsor for that content
can know how to fix it.

In the migration, we had to make a judgment call that the content
migration was good enough.  Pre-migration imports were done as tests,
those were announced to various groups to discuss amongst themselves,
time was given to point out missing content and formatting errors, and
so on. For every problem we found, we either fixed the migration script
or planned a work around.  We reached the point of diminishing returns
and decided to proceed with the migration schedule.

At this point, the new wiki has moved on and doing a sync without
overwriting work is likely to take much more effort on the part of a few
than manual cleanup spread across the entire community.  I'd welcome the
effort, but I'm not going to ask anyone to do it.

Thanks - Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41
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