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

[Ralf Gommers]

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 in the Numpy/Scipy documentation, or superceded by better resources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

Ralf



>
> In view of the above, I would remove links to wiki.scipy.org
> regardless, https://github.com/scipy/scipy.org/pull/121
>
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