Preamble
The MediaWiki https://wiki.wikimedia.it/ has a namespace called Direttivo: that was designed to be a reserved space for board members and a namespace called Ufficio: designed to keep secret stuff of the staff. These namespaces are not readable by any normal registered user and, as a consequence, after some years, it seems now nobody 100% knows (board, staff, ecc.) what these namespaces contain.
These namespaces were also useful to write drafts, but now this practice is not in use anymore by the board. The drafts are now written on nextCloud or Etherpad.
Description of the issue
At the moment the wiki has a stable situation where our access levels just work but stuff like T270456 make us believe that it is very delicate to maintain this architecture. This creates a deadlock where you don't want to try to update your software because you don't know if this could reveal a whole range of confidential information.
See also:
At the same time, the wiki is somehow growing and the service provider asked us to keep our resources in mind to optionally do something (delete something, ecc.). Just to say that it may be related to T279144 or not.
Proposed solution
It was requested to export these namespaces (Direttivo: and Ufficio:) from https://wiki.wikimedia.it/ to then be able to delete their contents from the wiki end eventually being able to start using these namespaces for other purposes (for example, to have read-only namespaces).
To export the contents there are some ways:
- MediaWiki Export page
- Documentation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Export
- Entry point: https://wiki.wikimedia.it/wiki/Speciale:Esporta
- Note: obviously you need to be authorized
- MediaWiki API
- Documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Ballpages
- Note: the API is not enabled at the moment and needs sysadmin intervention
- Entry point: https://wiki.wikimedia.it/api.php?action=query&generator=allpages&apnamespace=0&prop=info&format=json
- Tips: use Pywikibot.
- Database dump
- Documentation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_layout
- Note: this require sysadmin intervention
Resolution checks
Mark this as resolved when, for all pages in namespace Ufficio and Direttivo:
- you can access offline the last revision
- in their original wikitext
- bonus point: in an HTML export
- you have the whole history (in native XML format or SQL format or any format suitable for import)
Once exported, these contents should be archived elsewhere (e.g. nextCloud) for historical purposes.
Any idea is welcome for this migration. Assuming that probably no one is interested in these contents until they are exported 🙄
Tools
Query that was requested by @dario.crespi.wmit to monitor the situation: