I understand I volunteered for the job (it’s a dirty job and I think very few people would want to do it) but boy am I glad it’s done. I’ve just spent nearly two weeks converting content from the Mandriva development wiki (http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main) in TWiki to the new MediaWiki setup at http://mdv.vmlinuz.ca/. That will not be the final home for the new wiki, of course… currently we’re waiting on IS Team to get MediaWiki setup and integrated with the authentication system used with the other Mandriva sites. I’m told it should probably be up and ready next week at some point.

So for those of you who work on the development wiki, please do your work on the new site instead. I’ve asked Warly to make the old one read-only to keep the content available in case I’ve missed anything, but to prevent people from editing what’s already been imported.

I used a combination of a perl script that Thierry wrote to do the bulk of the dirty work and a BBEdit Text Factory as well (I wrote the latter based on the former after about a week since the perl script relied on a Mandriva perl module and I didn’t feel like installing that on OS X). I’ve made both the script and the Text Factory available for download for others to other use or just peek at. The problem with these scripts is they’re not the be-all and end-all, especially on a site with many different contributors… everyone seems to have their own style and syntax and boy does that make conversion interesting.

Aside from proofing, spell-checking, and styling, the wiki is pretty much done. As it stands, it looks much better than the TWiki did and the performance seems much better as well. Of course, once the proofing and spelling and everything else is done, it will look absolutely killer. We have a lot of content (379 pages to be approximate (well, according to MediaWiki’s stats)).

So, enjoy the new wiki. I know I sure like it better. But I must admit… I’ve lost pretty much all interest in even looking at a wiki for a while… kinda like when you’ve eaten pizza for two weeks and don’t want to eat it again for the better part of a year.

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