 Today, we'll try to tackle some of that. This talk is going to answer the questions, how do you maximize and protect your investment when your business relies on MediaWiki? Are there distributions backed by full-time professional support and documentation? In short, I'm going to try to review and do an exploration of the available options for businesses looking for MediaWiki support. I'm Greg Runlett, creator of Quality Box. Quality Box is a complete turnkey, production-ready, feature-rich, hosted solution to enterprise knowledge. It's based on MediaWiki, obviously, and the MESA system which is developed here at NASA by James and Darren. It's free software and brought to you by Equality Technology. We're aiming to be the best MediaWiki hosting and support group on the planet. If you want to learn more, talk with me about our partner program. Don't worry, we treat every partner as an equal. It's in our name. Every partner is either literally the owner of their own MediaWiki consultancy or part owner of Equality Technology. So I'm going to start talking a little bit about Quality Box. Since I started with that, it's got batteries included. MediaWiki, not so much. What I mean is that MediaWiki software download is like a bag of raw flour. If you want to eat, you need to add butter and sugar and eggs and milk and vanilla and chocolate chips and baking soda, baking powder. Oh, wait a minute, that's chocolate chip cookies. But anyway, you get the idea. Actually, there's a lot more ingredients that go into baking and enterprise Wiki. This here is the application architecture for MediaWiki itself, as kind of implemented at the foundation. You can read more about it on my Wiki. But business users and owners aren't concerned with that complexity. They're concerned with questions and institutional knowledge, not the complexity of your network diagrams. So that's what businesses, I think, expect from support organizations. And the primary service that we provide is to maintain and continuously upgrade all those pieces of that complex diagram or keep in the fridge stocked, I guess, if you want to make the food analogy, if I can carry that forward. And enterprise customers want security, not some $10 a month hosting plan. So we do things like daily automatic upgrades to the Linux kernel, all the applications, the entire lamp stack, every single bit running in the data center with an audit trail, with rollback capabilities, and without downtime, zero downtime with live kernel patching. So recently, the Wikimedia Foundation issued security patches for all versions. And I know sites like Wiki API or I've got my own Wiki report tool that kind of indexes hundreds and thousands of Wiki installations. And I know that people do not upgrade on a timely basis. So that's a big value add to if you're gonna be running a piece of enterprise software, you don't want to be the next victim of the next virus, the next security flaw. And so it should be treated like precious metals, right? So what companies are out there? I just want to give a quick mention to a group I hadn't heard of, they started a couple years ago. And I think the guy who started it was a former CIS admin from WMF. So maybe some people know who's in charge of that. But I think they're out in the Netherlands or someplace else, distributed group called Mirahees. And they don't offer commercial support. But what's interesting about them is they've got a totally free kind of fully featured Wiki system. And what this shows is I've got a tool that does a comparison of all the extensions. If you can access the API, then I can just query that API. And I can do a quick inventory of extensions, right? So the extensions listed in green are the extensions that are core to Meza and to Quality Box. The extensions in the middle there are additional extensions I've installed in Quality Box and tested and upgraded. And the ones on the far right are the exclusive ones, the ones that aren't found either in the local customizations or the core, but stuff that they're running over at Mirahees. So you can see they've got an extensive list of extensions. And they're running on, I think, a 1.29 or a 1.30 platform, so recent stuff. I want to mention Blue Spice because, and unfortunately, no one's here from Blue Spice. But Blue Spice is really the best option out there, I think globally, for MediaWiki Enterprise, MediaWiki hosting and support. I mean, they have a real organization put together. They do a great job of not just assembling the bits and pieces of MediaWiki, the whole stack, but also Marcus Glazer has put together a lot of custom code and extensions to enhance functionality. And they've got a great system for actually moving content back and forth using what's called WebDave technology so that you can just seamlessly access shared drives as part of your wiki. But that's it. Aside from Blue Spice, there really aren't any hosting companies that put together any kind of featureful, current, maintained, and customized full stack deployment of MediaWiki. And what you don't want, what no company wants, what I call the one-click wonders and the $5 a month hosting plans, you've got companies like Bitnami that really, I think they have a good mind share, maybe. They advertise a lot, right? And one-click installs of MediaWiki, what you get is they're running, what you get is nothing but MediaWiki, no extensions, no skins, no customization, no gadgets, no elastic search, no visual editor, nothing. So great for a developer to spin something up and try it. But that's about it. Excuse me. Heroku is one that has a lot of mind share, I think, for hosting. And they talk about their whole platform as a service. But again, it's basically nothing more than MediaWiki core, no skins, no extensions, no customization, nothing. So you're on your own, but in their environment that's designed to run Ruby apps. In fact, the branch that they use for their one-click install is a couple commits ahead of MediaWiki core and 12,322 commits behind MediaWiki core. So in other words, it hasn't been touched in like a year or more. So there are even recipes, because I investigated this for a client who was interested in moving to that platform comparing to Amazon and other name brand platforms, if you will. And what I found were how-tos just to get it running on Heroku. And once you get it running, you're stuck with Postgres as a database. And I have nothing against Postgres. Postgres is a fantastic database. But if you look at the data that comes out of the MediaWiki installations and everything, the number of installs in the wild for MediaWiki on Postgres are, what is it, 1%? I don't know the exact statistics, but it's a fraction. It's a tiny fraction. And so it's just not well-tested. And certainly, all the extensions aren't tested on that platform. So just know. Excuse me. Thank you, Peter. You've got WikiSpaces. I should say you had WikiSpaces. WikiSpaces just put out a notice last month that they're closing down. So one thing about QualityBox, we do include support, full support. In fact, we use Discourse. We've had a Discourse site running for over a year. And Discourse, I'm a huge fan of Discourse. Made by the same guy that started Stack Overflow and those kinds of sites, it's a great forum tool. So it's easy to use, great for community, great for developers. You can set up private areas so that you can have discussions that aren't just in front of everybody. And one thing I want to say is that brain motif that I came up with yesterday, part of that might be because I started this project two years ago to meet the needs of Partners Healthcare in Boston or more specifically, working with Dr. Halley and Ron Kinkinis of the Surgical Planning Lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital. And what they do at Surgical Planning Lab, among other things, they create a project called Slicer 3D. And Slicer 3D, it's a free software, cross-platform, open-source medical image processing and visualization system. And it was used to create that image there. It's literally the tool that you use, if you've ever seen this on TV, where they can scan someone's brain with an MRI or a CAT scan and get a 3D picture that the surgeon, as he's operating, can rotate and see and have 3D computer-guided surgery. So it's really cool, and they're doing it across the globe. It's a hugely popular project. So I say quality box helps you to save your brain, like store your knowledge. But literally, maybe that's a metaphorical sense. But it might also be responsible for saving your brain in the literal sense. Who knows? One last thing I want to say is that in an enterprise environment, you need dashboards and statistics and things to know how things are performing. And that kind of monitoring and professional administration of the environment is something that obviously doesn't come with core media wiki. But it's part of the quality box platform. We do things like monitoring the proxy, monitoring for traffic analytics, monitoring the elastic search backends and the cluster health, and monitoring server performance, and monitoring the caching systems, like PHP, PHP opcache. So let's see. And I think, yeah. Anyway, we're running some specials, so we can talk about that if there's any interest there. But yeah, I really did, when I chose this topic, I thought I was going to be able to get out there and at least give you a good analysis of a handful of high quality vendors. But even going through the list of what's listed, what you'll find on media wiki.org, as service providers, it's small consultants who do custom projects and implementation or theming. Richard Carter in England does theming. And there are small support organizations. But I'm not aware of any large scale dedicated media wiki. And in fact, if you look at the list, there are people in there that do WordPress and they just put their name up there. And so part of, again, what I'm trying to do here is actually build that organization because there are companies like, what's it called? It's not site engine, WordPress engine? Oh gosh, I forget the name. But there are a number of high profile, large companies that do support the WordPress platform or do support the Drupal platform. And why don't we have that for media wiki? So hopefully, we're going to change that. So thank you. Any questions? You mentioned earlier on your list of companies that do media wiki hosting. You mentioned Merizies and that kind of niche of people kind of targeting more of the free kind of audience. Another popular contender is Sheltwiki. I was just curious if you've heard of them. I have heard of Sheltwiki. And are they focused on gaming? I think they're kind of focused on people who used to use Wikia and got fed up with Wikia. It's my impression. That's true. I'm trying to remember. Although like Merizies, primary focused people who used to like TV tropes, I think, and got fed up with them and wanted to fork. So they're all kind of doing that. Yeah, I've heard of Sheltwiki. And I can't recall what type of service level they offer. Do you know? I think it's mostly similar to Merizies in that it's kind of a volunteer run thing. And they help you out. But it's not like you're not getting paid support, right? Yeah, I mean. You can't call them at 1 AM in the morning. Maybe you can't do that for the paid support either. And so the question is, for an organization like Mozilla or some other high profile, large scale, 1 million unique visitors a month, that type of environment, or not even 1 million a month, but just something if you've got 2,000 employees on an intranet system, you're going to want continuous support, quick turnaround, and constant uptime, and not a volunteer effort. So I just couldn't find anybody like that. I agree. I think it's missing. And I look forward to you doing it. Any other questions in the back? Just in your experience so far, have you found that there's been customers looking for something they don't know yet? They don't know what the wiki is, what media wiki is, or do they already have an instance and they just want to kind of transfer it over? No, everyone I've talked to has a wiki and they're looking to outsource the technology. They've got one engineer and they don't want to hire more and they don't even want to put that one engineer full time on it. So they want to outsource the technology. Or they've got, they're happy with their staffing levels, but not the skills. And they've been putting off upgrades and upgrades and upgrades, and they rely on the fact that it's all inside their corporate firewall. And so they're not in any huge rush to upgrade. But you reach a point where it's just the features aren't there, and then they have a huge step. Instead of taking tiny steps, he got this gigantic uphill slog, right? There you go. And then maybe training, so that sounds like maybe they already know what they're doing. You don't have to provide as much training or for new extensions. You give them a bit of an onboarding. Training is something that I've, it depends on the customer, because I've talked to a lot of companies that some want training. And it usually has to do with companies that are launching new wiki initiatives. I know there's a company in Boston called VistaPrint that's a big company, and they've got a huge wiki installation at that company. And they've got in-house expertise, and they've got smooth workflows and everything. So they don't need me, actually, because they do have that internal staff, because it's like a core feature of their business. But smaller groups and new initiatives and things like that, I had a couple of airline companies that were implementing wiki systems. And they definitely wanted training. They wanted a group of 10 or a group of 20 people to come in for training for a couple of days. And they wanted all kinds of training, right? They like end user training and how to edit. And they wanted some system administration training so that they could get more familiar with how it works. So there's good training opportunities, too, in corporate support. You explain a little bit about how that happened? Yeah, sure. So a couple of years ago, I worked with the folks at Brigham and Women's Hospital. They had a whole bunch of wikis that were very core to their operations, but they were all set up several years prior by a company in North Carolina that didn't support... They didn't have that support anymore and they had a bunch of custom extensions. They had a bunch of Java code that kind of moved stuff from a back end wiki to a front end wiki and they tied together some whole document management system. So they had a large need to really upgrade their entire setup. And they also, they do a lot of research and grant funded projects. So when they get a new grant, one of the things that they have to do as part of the grant is to report on their, what was the... What did they produce with that grant? And the wiki would help them meet the grant requirements. So every time they got a new grant, they wanted a new wiki, but they wanted it to be like the last wiki. And the experience of what most people experience building wikis is like, okay, so you kind of have this recipe that you go through and then you try to repeat the process and keep a good document, probably in a wiki on how to do that. What I saw is this, that had been DevOps had become a real thing, right? And there's, I'm gonna keep my eye on the time here. Just puppet chef, Ansible, all kinds of ways of putting that recipe on how to build it in code. Not steps that you follow and you could fudge up, but just literal code. So that when I deploy Meza or quality box, it's a command and you sit back and watch a thousand lines scroll by the screen as it goes out and grabs an image or even first, provisions a cloud cluster and then installs the operating system and then installs Apache and PHP and MySQL and then upgrades everything and then opens the port on the firewall for this machine to talk to that machine and does everything, soup to nuts. And then it's like, ding, done. So I started building that system, but then another client came to me and so I was building a system for partners. Another client came to me and my system wasn't fully baked. I was trying to do the mass virtual hosting in Apache and get the farm, right? How do you do the farm part and do it right? And I couldn't get that done, but this client needed it done yesterday. So I had fortunately already met the guys here at NASA online and I was like, wow, theirs is working, so I'll just use theirs. So I switched from Ubuntu to Sentos or Red Hat and the rest is history. I've been trying to contribute as much as possible to that code base. Thank you.