Forum:Board Meeting - July 26th, 2020

Forums: Index > Board Meeting - July 26th, 2020

This page or section is an archive. Please do not edit the contents of this page. This thread was archived on 30 September 2020 by Elessar2.

General Meeting Minutes July 26

Hello wikians, the third board meeting of the year took place on July 26th, 2020 at 19:00 UTC and ran for about 3 hours. Topics discussed at the meeting included wiki retrospectives since the last meeting, the google cloud platform (GCP) migration and budget concerns. Cook and Yuri Nikolai (Crowborn) were not able to attend and TehKittyCat part of the meeting as a guest. There were no resolutions presented or passed at this meeting.

RuneScape Wiki Retrospective

Not much since the last meeting; last update was Arch and nothing since. Few Interesting threads of suggestions. Arch Server Collab, slightly controversial :), few page features. Portable locations thread implemented in-gadget. New data logging projects cropping up and requests for a Data namespace, xXℬlackĦawkXx making good progress but semi stuck. Events Team planning in-game RuneFest/WikiFest, coincides with Double XP.

Update: The in-game WikiFest took place on Saturday August 8th, see Summer Party (Wikifest 2020) for details and photos! - 09:35, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Old School Wiki Retrospective

Many Data driven projects, lots of close connections with Jmods and RuneLite Devs who give unique insight and code for Droptables, Mechanics, etc. Runelite Renderer seeing increased use on the Wiki. In-game the new Mory Update went well and added to wiki very quickly.

P.S. Classic Wiki has seen a huge surge in editing (thanks Infoboxes) and has since cleaned up very nicely with help from Cache Crawling, inter-wiki linking. Made new connections to some RSPS Classic Communities. Deleted a bunch of remnant articles/pages from the Wikia-era.

Pt-Br Wiki Retrospective

More modules, infoboxes, etc. ported over and fixed. Holding off until GE Extension for GE prices, likely similar time to GCP move. PT-BR Chugging along nicely.

Video transcription

Nex and Cook had a meeting with Jagex about video transcription. Personal attempts on wiki were too expensive so turned to Jagex for support but not much came of it. Nex also found it wasn’t particularly accurate either and interest died. Jagex Intern manually transcribes their stuff, oof.

Tech things

GCP Migration and GE Extension

Also upgrades Core Mediawiki Platform (to 1.35), GE Extension targeted to follow shortly after migration. Delays and complications with migration because of SMW not being updated and very difficult to fix ourselves. DPLForum (no longer developed) and DPL may also be issues. Alternative for SMW does exist (Cargo extension) if time pressure is present but needs to be evaluated for viability, requires rewrites of many modules especially on RS3 and OS wikis. Soft Move date is End of August, will reevaluate upgrade, and smw mid August based on development statuses. Other possible future tech projects (wikidata, common image library etc) will be held off, at least until the GCP migration is complete).

Update: Since the board meeting the situation has changed a bit. MediaWiki's 1.35 release has been delayed to late August. SMW has decided to skip formal MediaWiki 1.35 compatibility for its next release due to test failures, but some development wikis seem to be running it fine, so as long as we make sure it's working with our setup we should be good to go. [Elessar2] removed all usage of DPLforum, so [TehKittyCat] won't need to make it compatible with MediaWiki 1.35. That leaves DPL needing compatibility work for MediaWiki 1.35, which [TehKittyCat] will take care of so he can bring up a test cluster. - 09:35, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

TL;DR DPLForum has been replaced with regular dpl across the wikis (this means that in the future the <forum></forum> will no longer work), and Kitty is working on the migration and, pending testing, we should be able to stick with using SMW. - 09:35, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikia account migration

Issue is that whilst having the ability to import wikia accounts we can’t do neat stuff like username changes and some other limitations. We get about 1 request per day in the way of someone migrating their account. More of a Tech Peeps issue, a public post about it will be made before disabling migration. Username Freeing/Renaming an issue for later, a discussion about it will be started to create a policy on renaming/name freeing when the time comes, prior to any implementation.

Update: The post on the discontinuing of wikia account migration, including pertinent information, can be found at Forum:Discontinuing Wikia account migration. - 09:35, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Additional Wiki's overhead

There has been an increase in interest about other language wikis as of late. Overhead for us, from a tech/financial standpoint is relatively low. More of a manpower issue than a technical one, new wiki champions will need a technical mindset (Lua, DPL, etc.) as most technical editors/admins can generally only help in English, making tracking down issues more difficult. Post Migration there are more tools to share data/information inter-wiki, i.e. using the one set of images. Elessar2 will start a meta discussion to develop a policy and procedure for creating new wikis.

Update: The meta discussion on creating new wikis can be found at Forum:Starting additional wikis. - 09:35, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Other

The possibility of using a different capture that is harder for bots to beat was brought up, Kitty suggested trying the one used by Cloudflare. It was decided to run a 1 month test to compare the numbers of spam accounts created.

Update: The new capture was quickly reverted as it took significantly longer to complete than the previous one. Cook has since suggested using a spam ip/email blacklist instead, which is a possibility. - 09:35, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Financial

The majority of our budget goes to infrastructure (hosting etc) and labor (our sysadmins) costs, while our source of income is Jagex support. Partially due to COVID-19 we have a small surplus this fiscal year, which we intent to carry over for future projects.

Community concerns

Social feed for OSW

The social feed being added to OSW is something for the osw admins/community to decide. If they want it, it's a small amount of work to make it live there too, but it will require people willing to maintain it (add items too it, done via discord).

Newsletter

The newsletter was just an idea of one of the board members, but since then other projects have taken priority. In lieu of a newsletter a page could be added to meta, where anyone can add current happenings on the wikis, and the board meeting updates can also be posted there.

Public budget/performance statements

The board does not distribute detailed budget statements, see Financial above.

Other wiki languages

See Additional Wiki's overhead above.

Miscellaneous

New media formats were implemented across the wiki (WEBM/MP4), the individual wikis can start discussions on changing the Image and Media Policies to use webm/mp4 for animations etc instead of gifs. Sadly the JMod who was pushing internally for better APIs has left Jagex, so the chances of much change in Jagex APIs is currently slim. A Cloudflare issue, which caused transparent images to appear with black backgrounds has been resolved by disabling a feature that converted to WEBP which was meant to help with bandwidth but was insignificant.

Update: A large overhaul of the how to edit pages on the runescape wiki took place to make them current and easier to use. Any additions from the community are welcome. - 09:35, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

I apologize for the late posting. Elessar2 (talk) 09:35, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

The data project has now gone live.  BlackHawk (Talk)    15:44, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - good stuff

• In-game wikifest was a success, nice for the ET to host a party as we haven't done so in a while. Attendance averaged at around 80 people.
• Classic wiki editing has definitely been laying dormant for a little while as the initial surge of editing has dropped off. Project is not really near completion, but (for me at least) I'm sure it will be picked up again over time.
• A Jagex intern doesn't manually do Jagex's transcriptions so I'm not sure if this is just a joke comment that went over my head or something, lol. Shame that auto (? semi-auto ?) transcribing isn't feasible, but it has (again?) since been brought up as a possibility of starting to manually do them (😩) and maybe setting as a OSWF task.
• Great to hear that username renaming might be on the horizon
• RE: Newsletter - While a page on meta sounds nice, and better than nothing, I feel like part of the appeal of the newsletter was for the wiki goings-ons to be advertised to the wider community, which thus, a page on meta would not achieve. Not sure how much more worth a communal page of all wiki active discussions summarised would be.

STAR the coolest bean (talk 2 me xoxo) 05:13, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Closed - Closing this, as the next meeting has been announced for sometime in October, please see Forum:Upcoming board meeting October 2020. Thank you, Elessar2 (talk) 08:00, 30 September 2020 (UTC)