Possible Revival of FIRSTwiki?

[Tristan Lall]

I think there are a few structural changes that ought to be made to FIRSTWiki, in order to make it more comfortable to manage:

1. Upgrade to MediaWiki 1.16.5 (currently at 1.6.5).
2. Install some of the interesting MediaWiki extensions, like the publish-to-PDF-book tool.
3. Figure out the copyright and licencing policy. There's no need to be as complicated as Wikimedia's wikis, but there might be advantages to encouraging users to upload the majority of things to Wikimedia Commons, while copyrighted emblems and insignia stay hosted locally, where they can be marked not for re-use. (On one hand, it reduces the control that the uploader and FIRSTWiki exert over the images—but on the other hand, it encourages broad-based exposure of the content, which is probably a net plus.)
4. The wiki is licenced under GFDL 1.2. That's a big pain, because it forces redistributors to provide a copy of the licence with the derivative work—not so bad for a licence dedicated to books, but inconvenient for short excerpts. Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 is a better alternative. (Unfortunately, FIRSTWiki missed the deadline to convert from GFDL 1.2 to CC-BY-SA 3.0; for complicated reasons, that option is no longer available, without the consent of all past authors whose work would be built upon.) Consider requiring all new content to be dual-licenced like Wikipedia does: both GFDL and CC-BY-SA.
5. Borrow the better parts of Wikipedia's style guides, and some useful templates. (They really are the best resource for wiki-based formatting, despite all the internal squabbling that goes on there.)
6. Since the fundamental unit of this site is a team's page, establish specific stylistic guidelines for that, to allow a clean, consistent appearance.
7. Have enough administrators active so that the wiki doesn't go dormant.
8. Allow admins to run scripts that chew up and destroy spam pages. (Back it up with a policy allowing deletion on sight of such pages. Right now, the deletion tag probably won't do anything, because nobody/nothing is looking for it!)