[SciPy-Dev] Retiring wiki.scipy.org?

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 5:02 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 6:54 PM, Pauli Virtanen <pav at iki.fi> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been looking through the stuff that was on wiki.scipy.org,
>> and it appears it would be the time to retire it.
>>
>> cf. http://pav.iki.fi/tmp/to-be-removed/localhost_8080/AllPages.html
>> for the actual material that is there.
>>
>>
>> I have the impression that:
>>
>> (1) Most of the material that is useful has been moved elsewhere.
>>
>> The download instructions, topical software, etc. are moved to
>> scipy.org and/or numpy/scipy documentation.
>>
>> The Numpy/Scipy tutorials that were there have mostly been subsumed
>> in the Numpy/Scipy documentation, or superceded by better resources
>> elsewhere eg. scipy-lectures.org. "Numpy for Matlab users" was
>> just added there too.
>>
>> The Cookbook section was converted to IPython notebooks
>> some years ago:  https://github.com/pv/SciPy-CookBook
>> However, several of these are not so relevant today.
>>
>> (2) The relevance of what's left is not so clear.
>>
>> The rest of the content seems fairly miscellaneous. Recipes
>> from converting code from Numeric/numarray are probably
>> not highly useful any more.
>>
>> If you know something valuable there not listed above, it would
>> be useful to point it out.
>>
>> Excluding edits to front/download/etc pages that are nowadays
>> on github/scipy/scipy.org, the wiki was edited 95 times in the
>> last 5 years; and 2 times within the last 2 years.
>
>
> Agreed, even in the converted material there's a lot that's not relevant
> anymore. What wasn't converted is even less relevant.
>
> There were some comments on the issue tracker about people looking for
> specific pages, so making a dump of everything available somewhere like
> Nathaniel suggested makes sense I think.
>
>> (3) Would having a wiki be useful?
>>
>> Based on the content there it's not clear if there is a need
>> for a wiki nowadays --- people can just put stuff up on
>> github/bitbucket/pypi and blog about it.
>>
>> It might be useful to have a "cookbook" collection,
>> but a github repository with ipython notebooks,
>> or Scipy Central, sound like better solutions for today
>> than a wiki.
>>
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
>
> I also had a look at visitor stats (see
> http://www.easycounter.com/report/scipy.org). Conclusion: scipy.org is a
> very active domain (global rank around 25000), but wiki.scipy.org only
> accounts for 1.65% of the total. That's still 3450 page views a day though.
> So putting redirects in for the most popular pages is important.
>
> +1 for no wiki anymore

Concrete proposal:

- take @rkern's dump of the underlying wiki data, and dump it into a
git repo at github.com/scipy/old-wiki for archival purposes
- take @pv's scrape of the rendered html pages, and dump them into the
same repo, but on the gh-pages branch

This will make the rendered HTML pages available at
http://scipy.github.io/old-wiki/, and we can point people there when
necessary. And puts the both the raw data and the readable versions
onto infrastructure that someone else will worry about maintaining
:-).

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org