Seems there is a New I2P Wiki available. It is based on content from the old one and as it was available. And it uses Creative Commons Zero as a license. Probably makes sense for public content on an anonymous network.

Now, as I want to contribute some more to I2P in the future, I have been thinking about wikis and alike before. Having a wiki would be a good thing because of the cooperative effort enabled. But will it be the next site to disappear then? And how secure is it to host it? Probably same problem as with any content management system, keep it up-to-date or get hacked? I see that as a big benefit of static pages as these here.

Well, besides that, I in general wouldn’t like to spend efforts on projects that I cannot just copy and also host myself. I therefore asked if backup/restore is possible (see thread@zzz.i2p) with that and got pointed to the ClearNet-Links of Mediawiki (see bottom for those). User Unconscious seems to be the hoster of the Wiki also and additionially provided the commands he/she uses:

user@host$ php /path/to/the/script/dumpBackup.php --current --include-files --uploads --output=gzip:/path/to/xml_dump/i2pwiki_current.xml.gz
user@host$ php /path/to/the/script/dumpBackup.php --full --include-files --uploads --output=gzip:/path/to/xml_dump/i2pwiki_full.xml.gz

Thx again mate. But no link to the data so far. I asked for those. Let’s see. If in doubt mirrorring backups would at least be something. But from a quick look at the pages at mediawiki, it seems … well, not easy. One needs a config file also. And data files like images need to be treated seperately it seems. While “will see”, I keep wondering if there would be better alternatives …

Possible Alternatives?

To me it sounds like we generally should see that we get more things distributed. Central systems are so bad, although we do need points where we come together also. This model basically also is what OpenSource made popular for code. And with GitHub there is a great tool for that. Now while talking about wikis, GitHub also has build in wikis. And there are some real cool things about those:

  • that they are git repositories themselves. That means one can clone any wiki easily and use pull-requests as in software projects to manage updates.
  • they support a variety of source material in addition to HTML, like markdown. This allows for easy editing while keeping the full potential.
  • generating passive pages via Jekyll (as I do here) is how they made project pages (gh-pages) work. Hosting static pages has a low barrier for me, so that actually would be a benefit.

Reading about GitHub pages was also what got me on the track which so far lead to these pages here. I searched if the GitHub code is available, but that does not seem to be the case. However there seemed to be several open source projects. GitLab does include wikis (see the ClearNet feature link at the bottom) and is available as source code (see the other link).

While the idea of a federated wiki (see Thread on FedWikis in Old Forum) sounds even more appealing to me, that might be more complicated also, though. To me it seems that federation is technically a problem still.

ClearNet-Links on this:

  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:DumpBackup.php
  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Importing_XML_dumps
  • https://about.gitlab.com/features/
  • https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master#README