[EM] electowiki.org: Miraheze possible(?) shutdown and MediaWiki hosting

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi folks,

Executive summary/BLUF/tl;dr: Miraheze announced plans to cease operations
in 2023, and electowiki.org needs to move (or shut down), and I'm looking
for ideas for sustaining electowiki.org by finding a new MediaWiki host.
Though Miraheze JUST announced that they NOT shutting down, it would seem
wise to have a "plan B" in the event of another possible shutdown

Details:
As many of you know, electowiki.org has been hosted by a UK-based wiki farm
named "Miraheze" since 2018.  Miraheze provides free hosting for
MediaWiki-based wiks, and electowiki.org (and the prior wiki hosted on
Electorama.com) rely on MediaWiki.  MediaWiki is the same website software
that the Wikimedia Foundation uses for Wikipedia.  I served on the Miraheze
board for two years (from the beginning of 2020 until the end of 2021).
System administration work and account-management and abuse-management work
("Trust & Safety", as it is frequently called[1]) is hard work, so I've
been grateful to the Miraheze folks for providing that service to the
electowiki.org community for the past five years.  When I dropped off the
Miraheze board at the end of 2021, I was admittedly a bit burned out, but
it seemed that Miraheze was sustainable.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_and_safety

At the end of my Miraheze tenure, I'll admit that I was still a bit baffled
at how the site is able to stay online.  The annual budget is tiny[2], and
everyone associated with the organization is a volunteer.  However, having
worked with people younger than me for most of my career, I've been
constantly reminded of how much chutzpah and energy that teenagers and
twenty-somethings bring to computer system administration and computer
programming.  When they start a project, they often think "we do these
things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to
be easy"[3]  Most of the volunteers associated with Miraheze are much
younger than me, and seemed to be fueled by the belief that a
volunteer-driven non-profit shouldn't have a problem providing ad-free web
hosting for free MediaWiki instances to anyone who wants a new wiki.
[2]: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230127-Minutes
[3]: https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/761656824202276864

Unfortunately, it would seem that the Miraheze community is continuing to
have a hard time addressing the burnout problem with its system
administrators and its trust-and-safety team.  A few days ago, they
published a timeline for when they plan to stop hosting wikis (like
electowiki), which called for effectively ending wiki hosting soon.[4]
This meant that electowiki.org (as we know it now) was slated to end around
the same time, unless we came up with a plan to find another host.
[4]: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230615-Statement

Many of you recall that Electowiki was hosted by Dreamhost (by me) from
2005 until 2018.  Getting an account was very difficult for several years
(nearly impossible), because account creation was broken, and in the later
portion of the Dreamhost years, it required me to personally modify the
Electowiki database.  In the very last years (2016 through 2018), I had
pretty much given up, and was looking at migrating off of MediaWiki.  It
had become almost impossible to prevent massive floods of account creation
from bots, since it had become cheap enough for hackers to circumvent
MediaWiki's fraud prevention mechanisms.

I started writing this email before I learned that Miraheze has a new batch
of volunteers to take over for the previous batch of volunteers.[5]  I
decided to finish writing this email, because I wanted to make sure that
everyone on this mailing list knows that electowiki.org relies on Miraheze
and MediaWiki.
[5]: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Miraheze_is_Not_Shutting_Down

If nothing else, y'all may want to consider donating money to Miraheze.
Their annual budget is about the same as a typical public school
Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), but they can't hold bake sales selling
slices of banana bread in plastic wrap to generous parents at in-person PTA
meetings.  If you all have ideas of the best place to host a live backup
copy of electowiki, I'd appreciate your thoughts, too.

Rob
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