[Lnc-business] L-Pedia

Caryn Ann Harlos carynannharlos at gmail.com
Mon Jun 20 21:08:41 EDT 2016


I do not recall this being brought up, and this seems like an issue who's
time for addressing is far overdue.  I inquired with James Gholston who has
been an administrator of accounts there, and he provided me with this
information and request.   I'd like to get this discussion going, and
perhaps if there is interest, speak with some of you about co-sponsoring a
motion to get this going.

====

As probably everyone I'm sending this email to knows, our party has a
history-centric wiki (since 2005) that has very high PageRank and shows up
heavily in searches. It is likely the biggest online repository that lists
names of people who have participated in the Libertarian Party (with access
to some party data, we could crank out a lot of biographical articles).


Situation: MediaWiki is not designed to be maintained without shell and ftp
access, but only paid contractors and staff have this level of access.
Meanwhile, the LNC Staff does not have time to maintain react-text: 196
LPedia.org /react-text
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2FLPedia.org%2F&h=IAQGLgKMN>, and
the party doesn't have the resources to pay someone to maintain it.


What problems do we have that result? Two big ones are visible on the front
page. Three years ago account creation was temporarily locked down when we
were getting more than 100 garbage articles and accounts added per minute
and it's still temporarily down. Also, a needed image permission is broken
on the server preventing image uploads while the wiki settings prohibit
linking to external images. The really pixellated image of John Hospers
isn't really an image. It's a table. ...And it's roughly a third of a
megabyte. A PNG or JPEG would be a tiny fraction of the size and would look
far nicer, but it hasn't been possible to add one of those for a few years.


Additional problems: The version of MediaWiki we're using is eight years
out of date -- and that update seven years ago was done by the LNC staff
spending money. Extensions are needed -- both to add features to handle the
data on react-text: 205 LPedia.org /react-text
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2FLPedia.org%2F&h=wAQH_h6KR>and
to control attacks (our PageRank makes us a high value target).


Our main tool for controlling attacks is a bot that runs on my personal
desktop (written four and a half years ago when successful attacks were
exceeding what could be humanly controlled in a reasonable amount of time
as a workaround for lack of server access) -- and stops running whenever my
machine or Internet connectivity are down, allowing garbage to accumulate.
We have no meaningful extensions to stop things (a decade-old CAPTCHA
that's easily bypassed -- especially with the version of MediaWiki we're
running). With the bot ( react-text: 211 http://lpedia.org/User:WHUMP
/react-text
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Flpedia.org%2FUser%3AWHUMP&h=mAQEXDhYU>)
it's possible to continue to allow anonymous contributions (most of our
contributions have always been anonymous -- many very substantial) and I
can bug people for usernames and email addresses and add the manually when
I know about them or personally recruit them, but reliance on these steps
is not optimal.


Also, what do we do when a PHP or SQL update breaks MediaWiki 1.12
altogether?


My suggested fix: Move react-text: 220 LPedia.org /react-text
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2FLPedia.org%2F&h=KAQGIW0iR>to a
server where trusted volunteers are allowed under-the-hood access. It
doesn't need to be anything even remotely fancy or expensive: A shared
hosting DreamHost account would be more than sufficient. Additional
volunteer-maintainable party domains -- presently existing or merely
potential -- could be hosted on the same server and also be maintained by
volunteers (and/or staff and contractors, time permitting). The LNC staff
can retain control when they see a need or find time to exercise it, yet
not be a bottleneck when there's simply too many things to do, not enough
staff, and not enough time for even just the essentials.


There are other historical concerns and things that might be relatively
easy to do to help the volunteers who participate with react-text: 226
LPedia.org /react-text
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2FLPedia.org%2F&h=QAQES3Arj>(I'd
like to change the default licence to public domain and I'm concerned about
the mold/mildew risk to our unscanned surviving archival documents after
the basement flood), but let me focus on just this one thing right now.

=======

I have cc'd James on this message so he can keep track and feed me relevant
information.


-- 
In Liberty,
Caryn Ann Harlos
Region 1 Representative
(Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming,
Washington)
Caryn.Ann.Harlos at LP.org
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