Comment 71 for bug 240067

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Geoff <email address hidden> wrote:
> Seems is would be the most simple to just copy the code that powers
> dev.launchpad.net over to wiki.launchpad.net and then adapt it for many
> projects, change the CSS, and you would have a working wiki. Anything is
> better than nothing.

The devil is in the details; the constraints we need to match are:
 - scaling : we have 30K projects and growing, plus distributions.
This is a substantial collection of wikis to run, and most traditional
wiki software (like moin) is not geared for this sort of volume.
 - security : spam is a massive problem on dev.launchpad.net (until we
locked it down) so some lockdown is needed per project
 - provisioning : dev.launchpad.net is manually maintained, and we
cannot afford to provision 30K projects by hand, including renames

Projects that just 'need a wiki' can easily create one on wikispaces,
wikidot, googlesites - theres no value in Launchpad doing a half baked
wiki environment when there are solid ones already available which
projects hosted on Launchpad can use. We have a link you can fill in
to where the wiki is.

We will eventually do a good wiki implementation, and I share your
enthusiasm for it, but doing it badly will simply put us into catchup
mode where we are chasing problems for several years : we need to
allocate the resources to do it well, and then do it well. Right now,
our resources are committed to other things which are more important.

If you wanted to work on this yourself, I'd be delighted to put enough
time in to help you draft a LEP, but I estimate you'd be facing
between 80 and 120 man-hours of work for an experienced LP developer :
its not a trivial undertaking, and I wouldn't want you to think it was
easily doable in weekends and evenings.

-Rob