[WikiCaretakers] Report form Wiki Care Takers meeting

[Paul Hänsch]

TL;DR: Despite problems during the initial planning the meeting was
tremendously productive. It also turned out too short, and we should continue
our work at another hackathon. The nightly fauna in Essen is delightful ;-)
A very short protocol can be found at
https://wiki.fsfe.org/Teams/WikiCaretakers/Hackathon2017

At the beginning of April we had the Wiki CareTakers meeting in Essen. Even
though we started the planning as early as February, the preparation seemed
lacking at first. Finding a common schedule among three people - the two
coordinators and myself - delayed the planning considerably. When we finally
had set a date, I found that I lacked experience in publicly announcing events
and inviting people, and as a result we failed in attracting participants from
local groups. Then, on short notice one of the coordinators had to cancel for
personal reasons.

While we hoped to be working with four to ten people, we turned out to be only
three people at the meeting, including a volunteer from Berlin.

Despite the early travel we arrived considerably keen spirited, and could get
to work right away.

I granted Thomas Doczkal root access on the Wiki server because he is one of
the team coordinators. This seemed appropriate especially after it was
suggested more than once at the mailing list that Care Takers should have
increased access permission in the wiki.

Thomas and I proceeded by cleaning up redirection rules that got installed
after last years wiki migration. Our goal then was to keep all pages available
under their original URLs, even though we needed to move them around to make
the Wiki browsable. This produced more than one thousand automatically
generated lines of redirect rules, many to pages that were probably never
linked to. We managed to merge some of those rules together in a manual
review, but the list has still about six hundred entries.

We went over the wiki config, simplified the navigation menu a little and
fixed several CSS bugs. We noted some inconsistencies in the CSS that were
copied from the main FSFE web site style. Since we wanted to keep a consistent
corporate design, and didn't want to make decisions on the fsfe.org design, we
did not introduce any visual changes. It might help to work together with an
actual web designer to reconsider some of the styling on our site.

Meanwhile Sabet started to move pages out of the dumpster that constituted the
Migrated section. She managed to merge some of the scruffier pages and assign
sections to other ones. She also reevaluated the setup of some of those
namespaces, which after a year of growth, started to show signs of getting out
of hand again.

By 4 pm, the official end of the meeting, we were well immersed in our tasks.
We were also in need of rest since we had planned to spend the evening
together. So we concluded the meeting with a cup of coffe in the public part
of our meeting place, the Unperfekthaus.

The city of Essen piles up an unappealing number of shopping centers and
shopping miles. What I found most notable however is the segregation of motor
and pedestrian traffic. The city centre is almost completely cars free and we
could take a long walk through the network of wide promenades without having
to cross a street even once. We found a place to have dinner and another to
sit together for the evening. We retired to our respective hotels, not without
stopping to observe families of wild rabbits bouncing over the urban meadows at
night.

We started earlyer on saturday. We tackled some technical deficiencies, like
the lack of spell checking dictionaries, setting a monospace font for better
table and list editing in the text editor window, etc. Most important however
was, that we managed to dissolve the Migrated section which was dangling
around ever since the migration.

We reviewed some plugins that were suggested to us, but found that the top one
from the list, the ImprovedTableParser expects the application of a set of
unmaintained patches to the Moin installation. This dissuaded us from a
deployment, and it leaves us with some open requests regarding wiki plugins.

We also sorted out all the sections we would need on the wiki and all
top-level pages are now linked to from the front page.

When we closed the meeting to catch our trains home, we found that we could
easily have appended two more days. The overall working atmosphere has been
very focused, and we left with a feeling of having made good progress. Despite
the bumpy planning phase the meeting has been very productive. We were
thinking about having another hackathon in the near future.

I would like to extend thanks to Thomas Doczkal, for clearing his work
schedule to attend the meeting, to Sabet Peters for travelling from Berlin at
her own expense, and to Johannes Zarl-Zierl, even though he could not make it
there. I am glad to read, that everything turned out well for Johannes family,
and that he will be available as a coordinator again.

-- 
Paul Hänsch                     █▉            Webmaster, System-Hacker
                              █▉█▉█▉                                  
Jabber: paul at jabber.fsfe.org    ▉▉     Free Software Foundation Europe
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