Summary

The Eclipse Foundation has a MediaWiki instance(wiki.eclipse.org), and is proposing to deprecate this service in January 2024, and ultimately remove it in April 2026.

Background and Motivation

The Foundation's community wiki instance was started in 2005 as somewhere for the community to collaborate on relevant content(documentation, meeting minutes, planning, etc) in a time where there was little integrated support for such activities. Now, it is more common and more convenient to find wiki content alongside the code repository. GitHub and Eclipse GitLab both support this more modern approach.

Furthermore, we are aware that there is a non-negligible amount of stale and orphaned content on the wiki which may have equally non-negligible consequences on our community as a whole : https://wiki.eclipse.org/Special:AncientPages

As such our proposal is driven by the following:

• Projects are being moved to newer services that integrate wiki support directly
• Co-locating this information alongside project code makes it easier for the project communities to find and maintain content.
• Allowing IT staff to focus on services that add value. Duplicate services add little value.

To that end the Foundation’s IT team will work towards shutting down the standalone wiki.eclipse.org instance.

What’s been done so far

Only some preliminary planning and a few discussions about the path forward. Some projects have already elected to remove or duplicate their content in wikis that are available alongside their code.

What needs to be done

Content Migration Phase

Help Projects migrate from wiki.eclipse.org to other integrated options:

• Provide Documentation, FAQ/How-Tos and examples of successful project migrations
  • Wiki move FAQ
  • Also see: #681 (closed)
• Agree on a timeline with projects and their communities
• Create URL redirection rules for projects that want to move their content and would like wiki.eclipse.org to redirect to the new content location

Post-migration phase

• Medium Term read only copy
  • Create a static copy of the existing wiki pages.
  • Disable the MediaWiki application
• Long Term service shutdown
  • Remove the static copy, and replace with a generic 'service shutdown' page for pages that have not been redirected
  • URL redirects remain active

Proposed timeline

Throughout the entirety of this timeline, the IT team will use mailing lists, eclipsestatus.io, Twitter and other means of communicating with projects the upcoming activities ahead of time.

Apr-Jun 2023

• Send deprecation/shutdown reminder/notice to the Eclipse committers list, and encouraging them to move content and claim any relevant URLS that should be redirected.

Oct-Dec 2023

• [MW Oct/Dec] Send two notices reminding committers that the wiki will be made read-only
• [MW] Create a static copy of wiki.eclipse.org
• Gather any potential redirects (a project may ask to redirect a Wiki namespace to another URL)
• Follow the Wiki Recent Changes page, notify projects still editing the Wiki that it's deprecated

Jan-March 2024

• Follow the Wiki Recent Changes page, notify projects still editing the Wiki that it's deprecated

Apr-Jun 2024

• Deploy static copy of wiki.eclipse.org with redirects
• Shutdown and Archive the MediaWiki DB and application

Oct-Dec 2025

• Schedule service 'brownouts' for the static site.
• Send service shutdown reminder to committers

Jan-Mar 2026

• Schedule final service brownout for the static site.
• Send final shutdown notice to committers

Apr-Jun 2026

• Replace static site with a generic 'service shutdown' page
• Previously created redirects will remain active