The Wiki transition

In late December 2025, WilliamSeligman made the switch in the Nevis Wiki software from TWiki to Foswiki. This page discusses the reasons and consequences of the shift.

Why change?

• Over a year ago, the Nevis TWiki software began to slow down. When you logged into the wiki, as you must do if your pages are hidden from public view or you wish to make changes, the speed of loading pages became very slow. The apparent cause was an upgrade of perl on the wiki server; perl is the underlying scripting language of the wiki.

• There who use the wiki make frequent changes. They were forced to work around the speed problem through arcane means like switching between browsers, or frequently deleting their browser cookies and caches.

• The development of the TWiki software package has apparently halted. There have been no changes since 2018. Questions I asked in their support pages go unanswered. There's some drama behind it, but the short version is that Foswiki is the actively maintained and updated version of our wiki software.

• When WilliamSeligman tested Foswiki, the speed difference was huge. It was clear that this was the direction to go.

Why change suddenly?

There seemed no reason to deal with an aging, slow, and unsupported software package when the Foswiki software was available. WilliamSeligman felt it was best to make the transition swiftly, so we weren't left in the position of trying to maintain and upgrade pages on two different wikis.

Why stick with this wiki format?

Wiki is a concept, not a particular package. An example of an alternate wiki format is MediaWiki, the underlying wiki associated with Wikipedia,

The TWiki/Foswiki format has these advantages for us:

• It provides fine-grained access controls. For example, you can choose to allow only members of your research group to edit pages, or to view pages, on a group of pages or just a single one.

• It's compatible with the existing page markup language of all our wiki pages. Different wikis use a different markup language. Converting between them can be painful.

Links and such

All the old links should still work. A link such as this can remain unchanged:

https://twiki.nevis.columbia.edu/twiki/bin/view/ATLAS/WebHome

The new wiki server's full name is foswiki.nevis.columbia.edu. It's possible to use that name if you wish. Note that the intermediate level between the server name and /bin/ can be omitted.

https://foswiki.nevis.columbia.edu/bin/view/Veritas/WebHome

However, to "future-proof" us against further software changes, I've also set up the simple alias wiki.nevis.columbia.edu which we can use instead:

https://wiki.nevis.columbia.edu/bin/view/Main/Computing

Changes

The two software packages are not identical. You'll immediately notice some changes in font size, line spacing, and other aspect of the pages' appearance.

I did my best to copy over all the pages and attachments, preserve links, and remove boiler-plate links to pages that no longer exist (like ATasteOfTWiki).

If you spot any problems, please let WilliamSeligman know. In particular, if you were actively editing pages from Thu-Sat, Dec 25-27 2025, it's likely some of your edits were not copied over. Let me know and I'll take care of it.