[Haskell] New look for haskell.org: MediaWiki

[John Peterson]

As everyone has noticed during the "making Haskell more open"
discussion, MediaWiki was suggested as a better wiki technology for
haskell.org.  Ashley Yakeley has generously installed MediaWiki and we
would like to migrate the main pages of haskell.org into this wiki.
The migration is not complete - only the front page is finished - but
I'd like to make this public now so that there's time for comments.
In the end, this will allow anyone to come in and fix up the main
haskell.org pages - the people, the projects, the help for beginners,
whatever you want.  Olaf and I will then step back and let the
community work directly on the entire site without having to bother us
(a big advantage!).

This will also impact the old Haskell wiki.  Rather than try to
automatically convert the old wiki to the new one, we're going to ask
the community to come in and do this for us.  In particular, the new
wiki is under the GNU FDL so the licenses are not necessarily
compatible.  We will keep the two wikis going "side by side" for a
while but in the long term I hope all content migrates to MediaWiki
(we won't be deprecating the Trac stuff - this will stay as is).
I believe that MediaWiki is more professional looking and
has a nice separation of documentation and discussion that MoinMoin
lacks.  I hope that this will result in better wiki content and a more
organized site.  Moving content by hand will give us all a chance to
spruce up the existing content as it moves (and get rid of all the
ugly CamelCase page names!).

I expect that it will take another week or so for the rest of the
haskell.org pages to move into the new wiki - at that point we'll
"flip the switch" and take down the old pages (but not the old wiki
yet) and change the main page to point into the MediaWiki.  Content
that isn't being maintained by Olaf and I will stay as before although
I hope that more and more pages will move into the wiki and we won't
have to give out accounts to people on haskell.org just to host
projects. 

The new wiki isn't yet visible from the front page but you can find it
at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell

For you style sheet gurus, the style sheet itself is also in the wiki
at 

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/MediaWiki:Quiet.css

If anyone wants to help move the main pages over, drop me an email and
I'll coordinate things.

Feel free to start adding stuff to the new wiki.  It won't be visible
to the outside world immediately but you can get it ready for the
switch over.

This isn't a completely "done deal" - there is still time to object to
the whole thing or make suggestions.  Nothing will be visible to the
outside world until we make the switch later.  But I believe this will
result in a much better site and also make life a lot easier for Olaf
and I.  (And I apologize to everyone that's asked for updates to
haskell.org recently - I've been avoiding them to concentrate on
this!).

I'm sure some of the MediaWiki settings still need to be tweaked.
Send me mail if something in the configuration of MediaWiki needs to
be changed.

A big thanks again to Ashley!

   John