MediawikiMigration

Rationale

The documentation on the Redmine wiki has lot of duplication of information.

The solution that has been choosen for that is the following:

Other solutions were also possible such as migrating to documentation system like pandoc, but doing that would increase a lot the required skills of potential contributors.

Using complicated documentation systems has several issues:

Instead it would be better to use a documentation system that enable people without programming skills to easily contribute, while at the same time enabling people with programming skills to take advantage of it as well. Templates in various wikis system like Redmine or Mediawiki enables that.

In additions to wiki systems with templates, enabling to interface the documentation system with Wikidata also has many advantages:

Redmine wiki

Issues:

Mediawiki

Advantages: Issues:

Decision

At several conferences, including the Replicant conference in Paris in Summer 2019, and the FOSDEM, people were in favor of migrating to Mediawiki and didn't have objections to it.

Migration

The Replicant Project's Redmine wiki uses Textile markup language, while MediaWiki uses the Wikitext markup language.

It looks like some Redmine developers have recently been working to make it easier to transition from Textile to both generic Markdown and a more standardized flavor of Markdown called CommonMark: https://www.redmine.org/issues/32424 https://www.redmine.org/plugins/redmine_reformat https://github.com/orchitech/redmine_reformat https://hub.docker.com/r/orchitech/redmine-gfm

There is currently an RFC at MediaWiki about supporting CommonMark in MediaWiki natively: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Markdown

The comments section of MediaWiki's RFC page on this topic may be helpful to read for context on this proposal.

If we can find a reliable fork of MediaWiki that uses CommonMark instead of Wikitext, we should at least consider using it for the reasons outlined in the MediaWiki RFC links above and because of the fact that we now seem to have reliable software available to us to transition from Textile to CommonMark.

If we ultimately decide to use vanilla MediaWiki with Wikitext, or if we don't find any forks of Mediawiki that use CommonMark instead of Textile, it is our assumption that it would be easier to transition from the more common Markdown or CommonMark markup languages to MediaWiki's Wikitext markup language than it would be to transition from Textile directly to Wikitext. This assumption has been made based, in part, on arguments made here: https://hub.docker.com/r/orchitech/redmine-gfm

TODO:
-INSTALLATION: