Hi everyone,

I think I'm going along with the majority of folks who have replied thus far: I think it's a good idea to move the main site to Wordpress, and I also think it's a good idea to move the journal to another system (I know we've been in talks with revues.org, we might also consider Indiana University Bloomington's set-up which uses Open Journal System, they publish The Medieval Review and many other journals as well, although I don't know if there is anyone at IUB who would be willing to act as contact for that). Off the shelf technology has improved vastly in the years since DM was founded, and there's no reason for us not to take advantage of that (rather than playing sysadmin and building code from scratch - which can be fun, but is time consuming)

I think it would be great to have some kind of place to serve the type of information that the wiki has traditionally served - definitions of terms, lists of projects and tools, that kind of thing. Something that isn't well served by a blog-type interface, or even a regular website organization. I agree with Gabby that actually merging DM into the Digital Classicist wiki is probably not the best approach, because (let's be honest), medieval studies isn't classics. We could do well to learn from them however - having a closed wiki would help with the spam, and focusing on new methods for getting data into the wiki (as DC is organizing wiki sprints). I wonder if there's another type of site, not a wiki, that could be used for the same purpose? I can't think of anything.

My $.02 fwiw

Dot


On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 12:17 PM, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco <rosselli@ling.unipi.it> wrote:
Dear all,
a brief answer: I surely agree with 1 (moving the main site to the Wordpress CMS) and have no big problems with 3 (eventually moving the Journal to an open journal system), but I'm a little perplexed by 2, i.e. closing the wiki altogether to replace it with a blog. Basically, if we didn't manage to gather enough attention to make it a shared and contributed-to resource, things wouldn't change much moving it to a different technical platform; while on the purely technical side a Wordpress site can end up as spam-infested as a wiki one.

Merging the DM wiki with the Digital Classicist one make sense to me, or making its editing login-based and try to revive it, otherwise perhaps we should consider about shutting it down IMHO.

All best,

R

Il 21/05/2014 14:05, Stokes, Peter ha scritto:

Dear all,

I apologise for the length of this e-mail, but I write regarding a series of fairly fundamental changes to the DM infrastructure that we have been planning for some time now. Given the scale of these changes, we on the DM Board think it is important to explain these in some detail and request feedback from the Community before we go ahead with them. They will also require a change of the Byelaws, and so again we need input from the Community for this.

Unfortunately the existing infrastructure has proven unmanageable. The wiki and mailing-list have both been subject to large-scale spam attacks, such that the wiki now contains many many thousands of articles, only 70 or so of which are genuine. The wiki has also had almost no activity beyond that of the Board, and so it has not been doing the job that we had hoped. Furthermore the website itself, which we have been hosting and coding ourselves (with substantial help from James Cummings and Dan O’Donnell) is also proving increasingly difficult to manage: it depends on the generosity of James and Dan to host and administer, even adding new pages is not trivial, and it has needed a dramatic overhaul for some time but to do this requires much more time and effort than we have been able to manage. For all of these reasons, we propose the following:

1. Moving the static website from the existing infrastructure (Cocoon + TEI + custom XSLT) to a standard CMS (currently Wordpress).
2. Closing down the wiki entirely and replacing it with a blog.
3. For the moment we are leaving the Journal in place, but we are very likely to move it to a dedicated open journal hosting of some sort. We have been discussing this in some detail with Revues.org but are not yet committed to this.

As most of you have realised, we have already set up a Wordpress version of the site at <http://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/>, and this is already proving to overcome the problems listed above. The proposal is therefore to make this the DM site and close down the old one, except perhaps for the Journal.

However, the current Byelaws require that DM maintains a wiki (see <http://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/about/byelaws/#wiki>). The Board is therefore not free to close the existing wiki without first changing the Byelaws. Even if we chose to keep the wiki, however, the Board feels that the Byelaws should not lock us into using any single technology, and so they should be changed even if we keep the existing infrastructure. The details of the proposed changes to the Byelaws will be posted shortly as a separate e-mail and on the new website, but in essence we propose simply to replace the term 'wiki' with 'information resources' and to adapt the containing sentences accordingly.

We would be grateful for any feedback about any aspect of this, preferably by e-mail to the list for general discussion, or alternatively to board@digitalmedievalist.org or any members of the Board directly. The next Board meeting is 4pm GMT+1 on Monday 2 June, at which point any comments will be discussed, and any changes in the Byelaws will be presented to the membership for vote shortly after that (as specified in §9 of the Byelaws: <http://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/about/byelaws/#amendments>).

Thank you, and we look forward to receiving your comments.

Peter Stokes (on behalf of the Executive Board)

--
Dr Peter Stokes
Senior Lecturer
Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
Room 218, 2nd Floor
26-29 Drury Lane
London, WC2B 5RL
Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2813
peter.stokes@kcl.ac.uk


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--

Roberto Rosselli Del Turco      roberto.rossellidelturco at unito.it
Dipartimento di Studi           rosselli at ling.unipi.it
Umanistici                      Then spoke the thunder  DA
Universita' di Torino           Datta: what have we given?  (TSE)

 Hige sceal the heardra,     heorte the cenre,
 mod sceal the mare,       the ure maegen litlath.  (Maldon 312-3)


Digital Medievalist --  http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/
Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org
News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/
Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760
Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca
Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l



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