[Coco] the future of the NitrOS-9 wiki

[Tormod Volden]

-- because better documentation is the only way to save NitrOS-9 and
the OS-9 legacy from dying out --

MediaWiki vs Markdown (Allura)

The NitrOS-9 wiki was originally written in a MediaWiki format (same
as used on wikipedia.org), and this was a built-in (as "hosted app")
wiki engine at SourceForge until June 2014. At this point SourceForge
moved the built-in wiki infrastructure to their Allura platform, which
uses a Markdown format (also very popular these days). In the process
they converted all project wikis to the new format, with various luck.
Many may have noticed that the current NitrOS-9 wiki lacks some images
and some tables look odd.

Prior to this, they were documenting how to port a project wiki from
the built-in wiki engine to a MediaWiki engine that the project can
run on its own (SourceForge provides mysql data base instances and
everything needed). Meanwhile this documentation seems to have
disappeared, but I found it [1] through the Internet Archive. They
also kept backups of the old MediaWiki content.

This week I finally got to try out this MediaWiki setup and recovered
the old NitrOS-9 wiki from the backups. The result can be seen at
http://nitros9.sourceforge.net/wiki/

Note that it misses a few changes that have been done last year on the
official, converted wiki at https://sourceforge.net/p/nitros9/wiki/

(Also, the logo was just something I quickly sketched together. Is
there a proper NitrOS-9 logo?)

So this gives us the following choice:

1. Continue using the official, converted wiki in Markdown format
todo: we should fix up images and tables
advantages:
- Standard and supported at SourceForge
- Uses normal SourceForge accounts
- No administration needed

or

2. Use the rescued MediaWiki
todo: we must incorporate last year's few fixes
advantages:
- Much more features, e.g. RecentChanges and other SpecialPages
- Looks much better in my opinion
- MediaWiki is well maintained as standard on wikipedia etc


When it comes to speed and performance I am not sure, they are both a
bit slow and it varies a lot, probably depending on cache and server
load. I have not enabled caching on MediaWiki AFAIK.

The above advantages on each side seems pretty minor to me. It is more
a question of what would contributors like to work with!

Voicing your opinion in this thread does not automatically mean you
are taking on responsibility :) Though of course your voice will carry
more weight if you are already working on the wiki, or have good
intentions to do so.

Best regards,
Tormod

PS. Aaron, this might be a question for the DriveWire4 wiki as well. I
can do the MediaWiki setup there also if you like.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151008101534/http://sourceforge.net/p/forge/community-docs/Migrating%20MediaWiki%20from%20Hosted%20Apps/