Revansx

Hi, I’m Stanley Gould, a new EMWCon2020 attendee, seeking advice.

I believe that the SMW app is an essential add-on for Smartphones, for both personal knowledge storage and as a portable web-server to provide shared-knowledge access to multiple simultaneous users. The details are in my whitepaper “Sustainable Knowing” What are your thoughts?  stanleygould@gmail.com

Special thanks to WikiWorks
for the original analogy from
which this text is based.

An analogy for MediaWiki can be made to the world of cooking as follows:

The various software applications used by an organization can be compared to a large set of specialty knives that one might find in the kitchen, each one being specifically designed for a specific task: slicing vegetables, cutting meat, cutting bread, filleting fish, etc. Because the aim of the knife manufacturers is to develop each type of knife for a very specific well-defined purpose and to be the best at it. The overall utility of the knife for other tasks is an incompatible design goal; but at least you know, right out of the box, exactly which knife should be used for which task. So you needs lots of knives, one for each task.

However many experienced cooks and chefs will eventually settle on just "one good knife" for almost everything they do, because once they've gotten used to it, the "one good knife" can do almost everything they need.

Enterprise MediaWiki is to knowledge work what the "One Good Knife" is to the experienced chef.

Once you understand how it works, you can do most things with it acceptably well.

The two main challenges with using <Proprietary Software Solution XYZ> are:

1. Annual costs for "users who needs to know" - Often the procurement of <Proprietary Software Solution XYZ> involves license costs that are proportional to the number of users the organization wishes to have access to the product. To keep the total operational costs of the product down, organizations tend to keep this number at a minimum erring in the side of "only the number of users that are absolutely necessary" rather than "the number of people who's productivity and business functions benefit the most from having access to the data". As a result, the organization's data tends to gets locked-up in the "silo" of the proprietary system not because of any true organizational "need to know" decision, but rather due to cost concerns. In other words, many users in the organization who do have a "need to know" are forced to inefficiently work through a proxy user simply because the organization can't afford to let everyone know whom they would ideally prefer be able to know.

2. Annual costs for "continuous improvements" - Most organizations claim a model of "continuous improvement" to their processes and procedures, however, when software solutions require per-feature and per-task fees to the developer/provider of <XYZ> organization tend to "freeze" or "continuously not improve" the system in order to keep costs down. As a result, most out-of-the-box workflows are primitive and the organization does not have the freedom to adapt over time to their continuously improving processes. In other words, organizations have to "pay to improve" versus having the "freedom to improve".

The GRC-ATF Knowledge Management System (KMS) uses Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) in conjunction with numerous other reputable 3rd-party MediaWiki extensions to deliver an entirely open-source Web 3.0 software stack for GRC-ATF, which enables low-cost digital transformation of all business processes. Software Configuration Management of the entire SMW application is fully automated using the NASA-developed Ansible project MEZA, which treats the entire application tech stack as Infrastructure-As-Code running on a GRC Data Center Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) Virtual Machine (VM). With built-in SAML integration for Authentication and Authorization, the application works seamlessly with NASA's LaunchPad SSO and the Agency’s centralized authorization management system (NAMS). The wiki farm produced by the MEZA project allows for easy deployment of new, standardized wikis with unique ACLs for NIST MODERATE agency data and as part of a Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA).

Using this platform, GRC-ATF staff are directly empowered with a DIY approach to digitally transform existing paper-based workflows as well as to formalize new ad-hoc processes as needed. The only cost to this project is the PaaS VM it runs on and the small budget for local maintenance. This platform has enabled GRC-ATF’s organizational information to be managed as in-wiki query-able data rather than files. The data is both human-readable and machine processable, which has enabled GRC-ATF to automate repetitive data processing tasks through the use of bots. The flexibility of the platform has enabled GRC-ATF to develop a wiki farm that meets our exact needs, and can be perfected over time without having to work through contracts or agency service lines. GRC-ATF is free to operate and modify this system as-needed.

Great tutorial! =D Olson.jared.m (talk) 23:59, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

'Installing MEZA on a local VM from scratch' came in handy.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is organizing a call for feedback about community selection processes between February 1 and March 14. While the Wikimedia Foundation and the movement have grown about five times in the past ten years, the Board’s structure and processes have remained basically the same. As the Board is designed today, we have a problem of capacity, performance, and lack of representation of the movement’s diversity. Our current processes to select individual volunteer and affiliate seats have some limitations. Direct elections tend to favor candidates from the leading language communities, regardless of how relevant their skills and experience might be in serving as a Board member, or contributing to the ability of the Board to perform its specific responsibilities. It is also a fact that the current processes have favored volunteers from North America and Western Europe. In the upcoming months, we need to renew three community seats and appoint three more community members in the new seats. This call for feedback is to see what processes can we all collaboratively design to promote and choose candidates that represent our movement and are prepared with the experience, skills, and insight to perform as trustees?

In this regard, two rounds of feedback meetings are being hosted to collect feedback from the technical communities in Wikimedia. Two rounds are being hosted with the same agenda, to accomodate people from various time zones across the globe. We will be discussing ideas proposed by the Board and the community to address the above mentioned problems. Please sign-up according to whatever is most comfortable to you. You are welcome to participate in both as well!

• Round 1 - Feb 25, 4:00 pm UTC
• Round 2 - Mar 4, 4:00 am UTC
• Sign-up and meeting details: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees/Call for feedback: Community Board seats/Conversations/MediaWiki and Wikitech

Also, please share this with other volunteers who might be interested in this. Let me know if you have any questions. KCVelaga (WMF), 14:38, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

• Skin:Erudite
• Skin:Metrolook

@Revansx, Yaron Koren: I think the term you were looking for, instead of 'dark web', was 'deep web'. (And thanks for an interesting podcast! I hope to make it to EMWCon.)

Yes "Deep Web". Perfect! .. Thanks and Thank you!

I don't think "deep web" is it either... I believe "deep web" refers to pages that are online and publicly viewable, but that can't be accessed by a search engine. An example would be flight information that you need to select some options to get to. Or even be logged in for. That's different from content that's not even available to the outside world. I could be wrong, though.

I do hope you can make it to EMWCon, though!

This sounds like a great conversation to have over a few brews.

That sounds good. Dark, presumably. :)

Someone changed the title from "Dark Web" to "Class B".. Anyone know what this means?

Changed back; just routine spam/vandalism.

Hi Richard, I saw your post in Extension_talk:Mermaid, and it sounds like you have solved a problem I am having as well. I am not sure some details, though.

1. format is now plainlist, template is deprecated; did you have to update anything?
2. you say "use the "import-annotation=true" - so is it true or yes? SMW documentation makes it look like "yes"
3. you say "notice that the template begins with a "CR/LF". This is crucial for the Mermaid parser call to process properly." - do you actually mean "make sure"? And, do you mean "put the wiki typical two empty lines" or "put a
   ", or something different yet?

Thanks in advance! If I get this figured out I plan to put a page on the SMW documentation to make this a bit easier on the next person. Tenbergen (talk) 21:19, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Tenbergen,

1. The depreciation of the "template" format is not something I knew about. Thanks. I'm still on MW 1.30 and SMW 2.5.6 so I can't comment on that.
2. "true" works for me. Not sure about SMW 3.0.0 .. if "true" doesn't work, give "yes" a try.
3. In the template that I call from my ASK statement, I make sure to start the content of the template 1 line down - just use the "enter key" in the wiki source.

If my responses don't make sense or don't work for you, I'll try to give you an explicit example, but all the little tricks it took me a while to discover are shared here so I think it will work for you once you start tinkering and testing. Please let me know how it goes.

Actually you sent me off in the right direction there. I had some <br>s in my template to lay things out cleaner; when I ran them directly that worked fine, but apparently what was spit out into the mermaid tag didn't work. Took out the <br>s and now it works.

Mind you, I had also added the blank line at the top of the template as you mentioned. I just took that out again, and the template still works. So there must be further trickery involved yet.

I am starting the documentation on SMW wiki at https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Tenbergen/Mermaid_with_SMW - if you have any tricks to add, that would be great. I will email Karsten to see what his thoughts are on where to put this on SMW wiki, a sub-page of my user page doesn't tie this in well with other content.

Thanks for your help!