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wiki.villagecollaborative.net seems to have been taken down
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my wiki wiki.villagecollaborative.net seems to have been taken down.

74FC3DD5-1496-498F-A13C-428263DD35FC.png (2×960 px, 903 KB)

Can you tell me what happened, when, and why?
thanks, Tim.

Event Timeline

Looks like your wiki could have been locked or deleted as a automated action from the Miraheze's Dormancy Policy.
But before that, could you let me know the category and the language that your wiki worked on?

Language, English, as far as I know category I don't know.
You can't find and definitely need these details before taking any step about a site that that has been shut down?

I didn't see any notice about this, how is a shutdown usually communicated?

Language, English, as far as I know category I don't know.
You can't find and definitely need these details before taking any step about a site that that has been shut down?

I didn't see any notice about this, how is a shutdown usually communicated?

I don't see your wiki on any list that I could access in, so for now I would let the sysadmin/Stewards answer the question for you '_'

Reception123 subscribed.

@Tmccormick1 Hi. Your wiki was indeed deleted on 12 May this year per the Dormancy Policy (no activity in 6 months). We should be able to restore it from our XML backups but images and logs will unfortunately no longer be available. In the future, you can request an exemption to the Dormancy Policy if your wiki is meant to be read. There should have been a closure notification via email, did this not happen?

Reception123 triaged this task as Normal priority.Jun 5 2021, 08:04

TM> I didn't see any notice about this, how is a shutdown usually communicated?

In the "Dormancy Policy," I see: "the wiki will be automatically closed/locked (making it read-only). Bureaucrats of the wiki will be notified on their talk page (on the affected wiki) and via email (if the user set a confirmed email address in Special:Preferences)."

So the policy is, the account holder / wiki owner is notified only when a wiki is closed, and only if they are users of a certain type 'Bureaucrat' and an email address has been configured on a certain page in the wiki?

I am honestly finding hard to believe. I've been a customer and user of 100s of web services (probably a majority of them, free services), over 30 years, for myself and on behalf of many companies/organizations, and don't think I've ever heard of or experienced an account and its data being deleted without notification of the account holder.

In this case, the wiki had little material in it, but it was linked to from various places, and any case of someone following a link to find wiki non-existent would be harmful, from the organization's perspective.

For me this rather calls into question the stability/sustainability of the other, much larger and more important 6-year-old wiki I administer on Miraheze. An unnotified and irreversible deletion of that wiki would be a major loss, and e.g. the set of images could be very difficult to fully reconstruct and replace, even though periodically backed up.

Incidentally, 'activity' defined as editing a wiki strikes me as problematic, because to my knowledge it is very typical that viewing activity of web resources is often orders of magnitude greater than creating/editing activity -- as is the case on wikis and other related projects I administer. Also, typical that collaboratively-created resources are not continuously or permanently changing.

TM> I didn't see any notice about this, how is a shutdown usually communicated?

In the "Dormancy Policy," I see: "the wiki will be automatically closed/locked (making it read-only). Bureaucrats of the wiki will be notified on their talk page (on the affected wiki) and via email (if the user set a confirmed email address in Special:Preferences)."

So the policy is, the account holder / wiki owner is notified only when a wiki is closed, and only if they are users of a certain type 'Bureaucrat' and an email address has been configured on a certain page in the wiki?

I am honestly finding hard to believe. I've been a customer and user of 100s of web services (probably a majority of them, free services), over 30 years, for myself and on behalf of many companies/organizations, and don't think I've ever heard of or experienced an account and its data being deleted without notification of the account holder.

In this case, the wiki had little material in it, but it was linked to from various places, and any case of someone following a link to find wiki non-existent would be harmful, from the organization's perspective.

For me this rather calls into question the stability/sustainability of the other, much larger and more important 6-year-old wiki I administer on Miraheze. An unnotified and irreversible deletion of that wiki would be a major loss, and e.g. the set of images could be very difficult to fully reconstruct and replace, even though periodically backed up.

Incidentally, 'activity' defined as editing a wiki strikes me as problematic, because to my knowledge it is very typical that viewing activity of web resources is often orders of magnitude greater than creating/editing activity -- as is the case on wikis and other related projects I administer. Also, typical that collaboratively-created resources are not continuously or permanently changing.

Regarding notification, when a wiki is created the person who requested it is automatically a bureaucrat, so the idea is that upon closure the person who created it is notified as well as anyone else who they assign as a bureaucrat. There are also sitenotices displayed on the wiki when it's marked as inactive and when it's marked as closed.

Regarding deletion, only wikis are deleted, accounts are not deleted.

I'm sorry that you were unaware of this deletion and of this policy but unfortunately we have many users who create wikis here and either don't use them at all or abandon them which means more space is used up and more resources are needed, which is why we have this policy in place. "Activity" is not only editing but also log actions. In addition, users can easily backup wikis themselves by going to Special:DataDump (images and revisions). There is also the possibility of requesting an exemption to the Dormancy Policy for the reason you mention, if the wiki is meant to be read.

Would you like your wiki to be restored (XML)?

I can't help but think that in the time already spent dealing with this one case, it might have been possible to take substantial steps towards implementing a simple, automatic email notification to the accounts of any owner/creator of a wiki if the wiki is deemed inactive or put on a schedule for deletion. Not just to people of a certain configured role on that wiki, and not depending on a manual configuration of email in that wiki, which for many reasons may not be in effect.

This would have avoided this situation, and also would bring Miraheze into alignment with what, as far as I've ever experienced, is universal standard practice and expectation for web services, even free ones.

Yes, please restore from XML what portion of the wiki is restorable from that. I am not sure that the organization for whom this wiki was set up will feel comfortable continuing hosting this way, but in the meantime may as well put it back as best possible.

I can't help but think that in the time already spent dealing with this one case, it might have been possible to take substantial steps towards implementing a simple, automatic email notification to the accounts of any owner/creator of a wiki if the wiki is deemed inactive or put on a schedule for deletion. Not just to people of a certain configured role on that wiki, and not depending on a manual configuration of email in that wiki, which for many reasons may not be in effect.

This would have avoided this situation, and also would bring Miraheze into alignment with what, as far as I've ever experienced, is universal standard practice and expectation for web services, even free ones.

Yes, please restore from XML what portion of the wiki is restorable from that. I am not sure that the organization for whom this wiki was set up will feel comfortable continuing hosting this way, but in the meantime may as well put it back as best possible.

I think there is a bit of confusion about the email notification. This should already be the case, there is no need to manually configure an email on the wiki, the email is the one that's set for the user account. The reason why it is 'bureaucrat' and not 'founder/requester' is because in some cases the person who requested the wiki originally may not actually be around anymore and replaced with someone else. All requesters/founders are bureaucrats to begin with anyway.

I really do apologise for this, and wonder if perhaps there was a problem with the email system if you say you didn't receive one.

Reception123 claimed this task.

It seems that there was indeed not much content at all on the wiki, but I've restored it and the custom domain. We will look into the issue and make sure that there isn't a problem with the email system.

I hope you decide to stay with us and if that is the case I recommend requesting a Dormancy Policy exemption here

I can't help but think that in the time already spent dealing with this one case, it might have been possible to take substantial steps towards implementing a simple, automatic email notification to the accounts of any owner/creator of a wiki if the wiki is deemed inactive or put on a schedule for deletion. Not just to people of a certain configured role on that wiki, and not depending on a manual configuration of email in that wiki, which for many reasons may not be in effect.

This would have avoided this situation, and also would bring Miraheze into alignment with what, as far as I've ever experienced, is universal standard practice and expectation for web services, even free ones.

Yes, please restore from XML what portion of the wiki is restorable from that. I am not sure that the organization for whom this wiki was set up will feel comfortable continuing hosting this way, but in the meantime may as well put it back as best possible.

I think there is a bit of confusion about the email notification. This should already be the case, there is no need to manually configure an email on the wiki, the email is the one that's set for the user account. The reason why it is 'bureaucrat' and not 'founder/requester' is because in some cases the person who requested the wiki originally may not actually be around anymore and replaced with someone else. All requesters/founders are bureaucrats to begin with anyway.

I really do apologise for this, and wonder if perhaps there was a problem with the email system if you say you didn't receive one.

@Reception123 Have we ever actually tested that the e-mail notification to bureaucrats still works? Reason I ask is I've never heard from a bureaucrat of having received any e-mail notifications?

I can't help but think that in the time already spent dealing with this one case, it might have been possible to take substantial steps towards implementing a simple, automatic email notification to the accounts of any owner/creator of a wiki if the wiki is deemed inactive or put on a schedule for deletion. Not just to people of a certain configured role on that wiki, and not depending on a manual configuration of email in that wiki, which for many reasons may not be in effect.

This would have avoided this situation, and also would bring Miraheze into alignment with what, as far as I've ever experienced, is universal standard practice and expectation for web services, even free ones.

Yes, please restore from XML what portion of the wiki is restorable from that. I am not sure that the organization for whom this wiki was set up will feel comfortable continuing hosting this way, but in the meantime may as well put it back as best possible.

I think there is a bit of confusion about the email notification. This should already be the case, there is no need to manually configure an email on the wiki, the email is the one that's set for the user account. The reason why it is 'bureaucrat' and not 'founder/requester' is because in some cases the person who requested the wiki originally may not actually be around anymore and replaced with someone else. All requesters/founders are bureaucrats to begin with anyway.

I really do apologise for this, and wonder if perhaps there was a problem with the email system if you say you didn't receive one.

@Reception123 Have we ever actually tested that the e-mail notification to bureaucrats still works? Reason I ask is I've never heard from a bureaucrat of having received any e-mail notifications?

That's what I said above yes, we're going to look into it to make sure there's not a problem with that.