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<p>Hi everybody,</p>
<p>the MDN team has informed us about upcoming changes: MDN is
transitioning from a wiki based platform to a GitHub based
platform.<br>
Also, they are shrinking their "active content" in an effort to
focus MDN on its brand core as a top reference for internet
technologies (HTML, JavaScript), so peripheral and/or outdated
content including articles tagged "Thunderbird", "Deprecated" and
"Archive" will be archived as a fixed snapshot.<br>
</p>
<p>Thomas and I have been communicating with members of the
Thunderbird add-ons team and the MDN team to get more information
and work out the relevance for Thunderbird and the way forward.<br>
</p>
<p>Technically, the content of the entire MDN wiki will be exported
into two GitHub repositories, which are already set up:<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://github.com/mdn/content" moz-do-not-send="true">https://github.com/mdn/content</a></li>
<li><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://github.com/mdn/archived-content"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://github.com/mdn/archived-content</a></li>
</ul>
<p>There will be a final export from the MDN wiki to these two
repositories just before switching to the new MDN system, planned
for December. From our current understanding, the new MDN will
look almost identical to the current MDN and the URLs of the
individual articles will not change.</p>
<p>Articles moved to the <i>archived-content</i> repository will be
handled differently from articles moved to the <i>content</i>
repository:<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>MDN pages generated from the <i>archived-content</i>
repository will no longer be indexed by Google nor be searchable
by the new MDN search.</li>
<li>Furthermore, <i>archived-content</i> cannot be altered any
more (MDN won't accept archive pull requests), so essentially it
becomes a frozen snapshot.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>To our current knowledge, the new MDN will not be localized (the
<i>content</i> repository contains only English files) and all
other language files are also migrated to the <i>archived-content</i>
repository.<b><br>
</b></p>
<p><b><br>
</b></p>
<p><b>What is changing for the Thunderbird Project?</b> </p>
<p><b>All archived pages (including Thunderbird, XPCOM and XUL
related pages) will no longer be searchable and can no longer be
altered. But the pages are still "there", i.e. they will
continue to be accessible under their current URLs.</b></p>
<p><b>We will try to restore search-ability of MDN's </b><b><i>archived-content</i></b>,
but we will focus on that in a second step.</p>
<p>Currently we want to evaluate if the <i>archived-content</i>
repository may contain articles which are actually still topical
and important to the Thunderbird project <i>and may require
future updates</i>. The MDN <i>archived-content</i> repository
comprises a total of about 8000 articles, so we can't go through
all of them one by one, but <b>if you know of any high-value
Thunderbird-relevant articles that may need future editing, let
us know</b>. <br>
</p>
<p>I parsed the <i>archived-content</i> repository and extracted
links to the original MDN articles and grouped them for better
accessibility into the following lists: <br>
</p>
<ul>
<li><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jobisoft/archived-content/blob/main/generated_links/archived-content-b2g_os.html">archived-content-b2g_os.html</a>
(1000)<br>
</li>
<li><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jobisoft/archived-content/blob/main/generated_links/archived-content-spidermonkey.html">archived-content-spidermonkey.html</a>
(557)</li>
<li><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jobisoft/archived-content/blob/main/generated_links/archived-content-thunderbird.html">archived-content-thunderbird.html</a>
(127)<br>
</li>
<li><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jobisoft/archived-content/blob/main/generated_links/archived-content-xpcom.html">archived-content-xpcom.html</a>
(1275)<br>
</li>
<li><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jobisoft/archived-content/blob/main/generated_links/archived-content-xul.html">archived-content-xul.html</a>
(1204)<br>
</li>
<li><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jobisoft/archived-content/blob/main/generated_links/archived-content-add-ons.html">archived-content-add-ons.html</a>
(333)<br>
</li>
<li><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jobisoft/archived-content/blob/main/generated_links/archived-content-misc.html">archived-content-misc.html</a>
(1871)<br>
</li>
<li><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jobisoft/archived-content/blob/main/generated_links/archived-content-archive.html">archived-content-archive.html</a>
(1464) <br>
</li>
</ul>
<p> Please remember: This inquiry is not about identifying pages
which should be <i>preserved</i> (as all English pages will be
preserved), this is about identifying pages which should be<i>
moved to our own active conten</i>t (DTN, wiki.mozilla.org,
....). A good criterion for such articles could be that you'd be
willing to support us migrating it into Thunderbird's active
content. A good example is the account autoconfiguration article
by Ben Bucksch: We're still using that technology <i>and </i>we
may want to update this for future changes: <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration</a><br>
</p>
<p>As a sidenote and for completeness, there's an existing
cross-section of the above sets of articles which has been <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://wiki.developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/tag/Thunderbird">tagged
"Thunderbird" on MDN</a>. However, please note that the tagged
selection isn't complete, as it contains neither all articles
having "Thunderbird" in the slug, nor all of those articles from
other sections which may be of interest for Thunderbird.<br>
</p>
<p>Thanks for your time and support, </p>
John and Thomas
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