Some context: Wikinews requires a significant amount of off public wiki discussion for things like reviewing (they have a rigorous process before an article gets published; an actual workflow involves sharing private audio details with other reviewers during an interview). In the past they used to run an independent private wiki http://www.wikinewsie.org/wiki, which was operated by an admin whose heart has stopped for over 6 months. Now, when discussing on IRC, they've expressed a desire to host a private wiki on WMF servers. I've hence filed a request on their behalf, and @Acagastya can confirm if needed.

I personally support this request, having watched them work for quite a while as a RC patroller.

Could you add some general information on what "Wikinewsie" and the Wikinewsie Portal is, and/or link to it? thanks

edit: I made this comment right before the comment above showed up. thanks !:)

The username of the first account on the private wiki should be Acagastya, with email agastya@wn-reporters.org.

If it is about English Wikinews, I suggest something like en-review.wikinews.org to make it explicit that it refers to the English edition.

Let's think twice before "polluting" the wikinews.org namespace with non-regular-language-edition wikis. It might be better to keep special meta wikis under wikimedia.org

In T281520#7047417, @Dzahn wrote:

Let's think twice before "polluting" the wikinews.org namespace with non-regular-language-edition wikis. It might be better to keep special meta wikis under wikimedia.org

I'm against putting it into wikinews.org. It makes the wiki to be a "weird Wikinews instance", which is an irregularity I would like to avoid – it makes stuff like domain parsing harder, to name one instance.

It looks like this is supposed to be a private wiki used by an estabilished project, not a chapter/user-group used wiki, is that right?

@Ladsgroup I remember you had some reservations about chapter/user-group wikis. While this doesn't look like such a wiki, it looks similar enough to me. Do the same reservations apply here, in your opinion?

IMO, this wiki should be fine to exist. A 3rd party wiki used to be used for the same purpose, but stopped operating (which is the kind of issues WMF-hosted wiki fixes). I persoanlly don't have any issues with this being done.

support for uploading videos is needed, and the upper bound on size should be raised as necessary

MediaWiki supports files up to 2^32 bytes in size (~4.29 GB), and files up to that size should be already uploadable with chunked uploading (althrough that can be buggy). This upper limit cannot be customized per-wiki, as the database field MW uses to store image size has 32 bits, meaning the maximum number it can store is 2^32. T191804 and T191802 has discussions about possibility to make MediaWiki support larger files, but until that happens, 4.29 GB is the largest file you can get to MW.

I'm not sure what's the amount of files you would like to upload to the wiki is – if it's a high amount of data, it might run into videoscalers capacity/storage capacity issues.

In T281520#7047046, @Leaderboard wrote:

[...] In the past they used to run an independent private wiki http://www.wikinewsie.org/wiki, which was operated by an admin whose heart has stopped for over 6 months. [...]

In case you would like to import content from that wiki to the newly created one (if it gets approved), do you happen to have some form of dump of the data that used to be there?

We used to have a chapter/wiki, but few years ago, it was no longer considered by AffCom.
'Wikinewsie' word is used to mean two things -- one being someone who contributes to Wikinews, and second, it is used to refer to the accredited reporters and reviewers (users who can sight the edit, technically speaking) with scoop access.
Just like how we have Znuny where trusted VRT-agents can access the information to validate and approve a file on Commons (talking about permission@wikimedia), people who have access to scoop access are able to access evidence for the purpose of verification of the facts in a news article. Sometimes it is email, sometimes it is media document. By nature, it is not free, and cannot be put on Commons; and sometimes it is something reviewers should have access to, but not the general public. (An example that comes to mind is a source revealing something under the request of anonymity). One use being an archive repo for non-free media used as a source, be it a video, an audio interview, photos, and even PDF (an example that immediately pops up in mind is the PDF letter sent by the secretary of European Council upon request).

While most review process happens publicly on-wiki, I am aware one time, this article was first put on the private wiki, where it was reviewed, and once ready for publication, it was copied to on-wiki, and published. At times when reporting about other media being in violation of law, or when reporting about a story dealing with DMCA takedown -- and putting original sources in the article will lead to us receiving a take down notice too, merely for citing/stating "the violation took place on this site", we had to use private wiki.

'Wikinewsies' in this case refers to reviewers who are willing to review an OR or an exclusive interview. Any reviewer can choose to become a 'newsie, but not all reviewers are Wikinewsies. Hence the request for the name. 'Wikinewsie' refers to the enwn's reviewers who review ORs. Other language wikinews uses different terminology (like wikirreporteros on eswn).

Re the file size limit, I don't know but it is very unlikely we have files *that big*! 4GB will be way way more than enough. It is likely @Gryllida has the dump, which she might be able to provide for the purpose of importing.

I hope the provides clarification to @Dzahn @Urbanecm and @Ladsgroup for better understanding the purpose, to then support, or raise concerns/questions.

In T281520#7047701, @Urbanecm wrote:

It looks like this is supposed to be a private wiki used by an estabilished project, not a chapter/user-group used wiki, is that right?

Yes. This is a private wiki to be used by Wikinews as Agastya pointed out above, and has nothing to do with a chapter/user group.

If I could add my tuppence worth of opinion. This is something that should have happened many years ago but for one reason or another it didn’t. The purpose of the proposed wiki would be a private working space for preparation of news articles for English Wikinews. It would be similar in purpose to how Checkuser wiki or stewards wiki allows non-public discussion of potentially sensitive issues to take place.

I doubt there would be a need for files as large as 4.29 GB as most of the files currently hosted at English Wikinews are photos used on articles.

Ideally this proposed wiki would also have a VRT queue but this is something that could be arranged once the wiki is up and running.

@Green_Giant the issue of VRT, afaik, is we cannot sent the first initial outbound email. We can't send under our unique name. We will have to keep the server in the US, which let's be honest, does not have the best reputation for the press freedom index. Therefore, we have been running our own mail servers (after WMF denied Brian Mcneil in 2009-2010 to hand out @wikinews.org emails to non-staff members.) in locations which have better privacy-respecting laws. We have wn-reporters.org now, for that purpose.

It should have been there long-back, but for over a decade, after Bmc was declined, 'newsies have been funding the server and domain costs and maintainence.

In T281520#7048286, @Green_Giant wrote:

Ideally this proposed wiki would also have a VRT queue but this is something that could be arranged once the wiki is up and running.

We can look into VRT in a separate task after this is done (just want to avoid clutter). And yes, 4 GB should be plenty.

In T281520#7047701, @Urbanecm wrote:

@Ladsgroup I remember you had some reservations about chapter/user-group wikis. While this doesn't look like such a wiki, it looks similar enough to me. Do the same reservations apply here, in your opinion?

To be clear, I have no objections on creating wikis for chapters or TOs. I do have some reservations against UGs and would like affcom to come up with a process for that (which hasn't happened yet)

Back to this Wiki. My concern is more about having more and more misc wikis. We used to be in an era someone called the Oprah phase of wiki creation (and you get a wiki, and you get a wiki, and you get a wiki). Each wiki in production has lots of moving parts, elastic search, dbs, wikidata, anlaytics infra, .... Not being in a cluster makes it even a bigger maintenance burden. There's nothing against this request per se but I like to avoid having more misc wikis as much as possible.

One way I could see this to move forward is to have their wiki in wmcs, request a project, install mediawiki and let it stay there. Or have a general wiki-farm in wmcs (to provide wiki as a service to wm communities). Of course, we shouldn't move wikis with NDA information there (like checkusers, arbcom, etc.) but this wiki seems like a good fit for that. In long-term, I'd like to cluster some of our misc wikis (like all private wikis somewhere else to have better security) but that's for long-term.

I would be okay if the wiki was on the level of enwiki-arbcom or cu-wiki but since it doesn't look like it contains NDA information (if so, then why it was hosted in a third party system?) I'm against creating this wiki. If all wikinews admins (in all languages) want to share a wiki, that makes it bigger than just a enwikinews and can bring more merit to the request but I don't see much point in an admin-wiki for all wikinews wikis either.

In T281520#7049240, @Ladsgroup wrote:

In T281520#7047701, @Urbanecm wrote:

@Ladsgroup I remember you had some reservations about chapter/user-group wikis. While this doesn't look like such a wiki, it looks similar enough to me. Do the same reservations apply here, in your opinion?

I would be okay if the wiki was on the level of enwiki-arbcom or cu-wiki but since it doesn't look like it contains NDA information (if so, then why it was hosted in a third party system?) I'm against creating this wiki. If all wikinews admins (in all languages) want to share a wiki, that makes it bigger than just a enwikinews and can bring more merit to the request but I don't see much point in an admin-wiki for all wikinews wikis either.

It does contain NDA-level (or at least sufficiently confidential) information, such as private recording of individuals during an interview (which is the reason it is supposed to be a private wiki). And the reason why it was hosted on a third-party system is simple - because they didn't have any other choice then (and hence I encouraged them to move to a WMF hosted wiki). It's kind of ridiculous to expect Wikinews volunteers to spend >=$100 per year just for that.

Storing NDA-protected information in such places can be constituted as violation of your NDA. You know that? If it is NDA-level, then adding admins there is also breach of your NDA (because admins don't sign NDA with WMF)

I'm confident this wiki is not storing NDA-level information and in that case, As I said WMCS is a good option and it's free for such projects.

In T281520#7049364, @Ladsgroup wrote:

Storing NDA-protected information in such places can be constituted as violation of your NDA. You know that? If it is NDA-level, then adding admins there is also breach of your NDA (because admins don't sign NDA with WMF)

I'm confident this wiki is not storing NDA-level information and in that case, As I said WMCS is a good option and it's free for such projects.

Just to clarify; by NDA I am not referring to the non-public information agreement by the WMF; rather I was using the acronym "NDA" as a generic term for sufficiently confidential information.

@Ladsgroup FWIW, it is not something Wikinews admins do/use, it is what the reviewers need. Secondly, not all Wikinews have a concept of original reporting or exclusive interview, let alone the concept of review process. The requirement is a simple wiki, with no bells and whistles, just a wiki where we can upload files, and edit.

Plus, how did https://sysop-it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pagina_principale get approved in that case (in 2020) (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256545)? I would argue that no WMF-based NDA information occurs there, and it does feel like differential treatment when compared to this request.

I explained and say it again, Wikimedia production is not a WaaS (=Wiki as a service). WMCS is a better place for this.

In T281520#7051329, @Aklapper wrote:

Seems to be superseded by T281600.

To be clear, even if the request get rejected, I don't think wikimedia production is a good place for this project and this ticket should stay as declined.