IT Development/Progress meetings/18 April 2013/WMUK Migration Report
This is a brief report, prepared for the technology committee by Tom Morton, into the technical matters surrounding the migration of this Wiki to WMUK hosting.
Background
Preliminary discussion indicated that the WMUK membership would be in favour of taking over hosting of this Wiki. At the March tech contractors meeting I was asked to look into the relevant technical issues, and report on the feasibility. I have been in contact with Oliver Keyes and James Forrester (JF) at the WMF to gain some initial insight and will update this report as more details appear.
Technical issues
Several points were raised in connection with the migration:
- Will the WMF be happy to relinquish control of the Wiki to WMUK and update DNS to point to our hosting environment.
- How to we handle migration of accounts? It is presumed that the WMF will be unwilling to provide email addresses & passwords in connection with an SQL dump.
- Migration means losing SUL; what are the WMF's plans for SUL and will we be able to rejoin it at a later date?
- Do we have the technical capacity to host the WMUK wiki
Report
A dump of this Wiki's data is already available here. They appear to be made approx. twice per month, so a migration of page data could occur with careful timing. Recovery of accounts will be an issue (see later proposal) and I have asked JF who is best to contact to get a firm answer on this.
In principle no one I have talked to sees anyone objecting to us taking over the hosting of the wiki. It would probably be hosted at www.wikimedia.org.uk with a CNAME from uk.wikimedia.org (i.e. the opposite way round to what we have now - but from a user perspective little change).
According to JF, the Foundation have floated the idea of an OpenID style provider tied into SUL. Initial plans were for this to work only within the WMF cluster, but obviously it presents an opportunity for us to rejoin SUL in the future. This may be completed by the end of May, see [1]
In terms of technical capacity, to host the wiki - this is hard to judge and I need to track down more information about the traffic to our site. However, there doesn't seem any reason it would cause problems for our current infrastructure.
Account migration
The migration of accounts is a concern, as we don't want people to lose access. It is unlikely we will be provided password hashes or email addresses by the Foundation, so we need a method for people to recover their accounts. I suggest we utilise SUL and Wiki Mail to send an email to every user on this wiki with a SUL account, this will provide a special link to reset their password. Some development work will likely be needed to undertake this (e.g. writing a MediaWiki extension to undertake the recovery process).
For individuals without SUL or email addresses, we can employ a manual process by publishing an email address to contact the tech contractors with your details - who can then update the account manually.
WikiVoyage migration: http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:User_account_migration