Project:Update old wiki installations

This is an informal project to track the progress of helping wiki installations upgrade from EOL versions to current ones. According to WikiApiary, the four most popular MediaWiki branches are unsupported. In many cases these wikis are for software projects that we use or frequently visit.

Part of this seems like a testament to MediaWiki's security track record - we haven't had any major vulnerabilities in a while so there is no urgent need to upgrade. But in some cases this is discouraging to new development, knowing that even if you create a new feature, it may not be that widely used. The list on why to upgrade is also really skimpy, and undersells the progress made in each new version.

This project is a place to coordinate contacting the people who run these wikis, figuring out why they didn't upgrade, helping them through it, and ensuring they follow best practices so future upgrades are smooth.

Old wikis

• https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Special:Version - running 1.19, I talked briefly with them on IRC and it seems like someone who is a Debian Developer can probably get shell access to look into it. Legoktm (talk) 07:41, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
• http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Special:Version - running 1.26. Nemo was going to contact the maintainer about it.
• https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Special:Version - 1.26 / PHP 5.3

In progress

• https://wiki.haskell.org/Special:Version - working on upgrading their custom skin for them. They gave me shell access so I can look around, and they're using an old Debian package. Progress is tracked at https://github.com/ppelleti/haskell-wiki-bugs/issues/7. Legoktm (talk) 07:41, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Success stories

• https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Special:Version - made contact, upgraded from 1.19 to 1.23 (LTS at that time). They customized monobook only using on-wiki CSS so that was extremely straightforward to upgrade. This is only a partial success story since I now maintain their wiki for them, but they gave me stickers. Legoktm (talk) 07:41, 24 January 2017 (UTC)