[mythtv] Wiki maintenance

[f-myth-users at lab.media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2021 13:50:10 -0400
    > From: Scott T <scott.the.elm at gmail.com>

    > If I understand https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Namespace 
    > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Namespace> and 
    > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Using_custom_namespaces 
    > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Using_custom_namespaces> 
    > correctly: create a new namespace (e.g. "Obsolete" or "Historical") with 
    > index in [3000, 5000) and index % 2 == 0 which is not in either
    > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault 
    > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault> 
    > or https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgContentNamespaces 
    > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgContentNamespaces>

    > if you do not want to actually delete the pages.

That's an interesting idea.  You could then perhaps use CSS (see
"Styling namespaces" in "Using custom namespaces") to give the pages a
distinctive color at least, though I'm unsure if there's some clever way
to also (for example) add some text saying "probably obsolete."  (Maybe
there's some CSS element used in every page that could be co-opted
somehow.)  If you can't make them visually distinctive, though, in
a way that someone landing on a random page from a search engine
will immediately figure out even if they haven't seen some sort of
explanatory page, this mmay not help much.

This does have the advantage that the pages which are moved into the
namespace don't have their modification date updated and also means that
every such page doesn't have a spurious diff emitted (possibly also to
all watchers) about it.  I don't know if that really matters, though.

If namespaces are used, remember to move the Talk: pages, too.

(It would probably be a good idea to upgrade the wiki to the latest LTS
version first, though, in case there are bugs fixed in namespaces since
the ancient version we're currently running.  I haven't checked, but I'd
guess there might be.  Doing so may also make it easier to have account-
registration code which is less subject to spamming and thus make it
easier to give accounts to potential contributors without involving so
much manual overhead to approve them, which could help in maintenance.)

[Btw, my earlier template-based idea should probably also put every such
page into a category like "Obsolete," which makes them easier to find if
that's what you're trying to do.  One interesting idea even if we don't
go for the fancy per-version templates from my previous examples might
be to create tags which emit text like "first added in Myth v31" and
also have the appropriate category.  Then at least going forward, it's
possible to tell if you're looking at documentation that's newer than
whatever it is you're running.  But it might be easier just to use the
existing MW template, which is basically the same thing---I just haven't
recursively checked to see how many other templates MW might depend on,
though I'll point out that there -is- some sort of "export this template"
functionality somewhere in MediaWiki to make this sort of thing easier.]