Wiki?

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Anders Troberg
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Wiki?

Post by Anders Troberg » Wed Jun 14, 2006 9:49 am

I see a lot of nice information pass by on this site, but it soon gets lost in the depths of ancient threads. Plans, test results, formulas, definitions, general explanations and so on. Wisdom has to be rediscovered and questions have to be reasked needlessly. Newbies have no organized resource to quickly put them on track.

Clearly, the dynamic nature and (for this purpose) unstructured format of a forum is not the best way to preserve this.

However, there is a format that suits this perfectly, a wiki. For those of you who don't know what a wiki is or has never authored in a wiki, some additional explanations can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki.

Would people find it interesting and useful?

I realize Kenneth is otherwise engaged right now and may not have the time to set one up, but I could set one up on one of my servers in just a few hours (and most of that time spent removing my translation of PmWiki to Swedish, which contained some hacks as I didn't expect to have to go back to English). I already run several wikis, so it's not a big task for me. It would of course have backups and full revision history, so the work will be safe.

I don't want to steal Kenneth's thunder, so I will not do it if he thinks it would compete with this site. I will also not bother if no one thinks it would be useful and no one would provide content.

So, what's the verdict? Good idea or just plain stupid?

Irvine.J
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re: Wiki?

Post by Irvine.J » Wed Jun 14, 2006 12:18 pm

I wouldn't say its stupid at all. Though i dont know the internal politics of this forum, i'd say any information provided to a free resource like wiki is a good idea, and it would benifit lots of people. It should encourage newbies to ask questions though, a curious newbie is always better then a flammin' newbie.

Anders Troberg
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re: Wiki?

Post by Anders Troberg » Thu Jun 15, 2006 5:28 am

It's pretty much like MediaWiki, it's just a personal preference for me since I already run a bunch of PmWikis. The deciding factor for me was that in my first installation I needed to integrate user management with UBB.threads forum software, which was much easier to do in PmWiki.

It has all the important features (search, revision history, good configurability, fast, easy on the server resources, file/image upload, wikitrails (forward/back links on topics that are listed in a list) and so on), the major difference is that it doesn't need a database and that it's easier to move stuff between wikis.

I would say that MediaWiki and PmWiki are the two big wikis on the market. Both are good. MediaWiki is probably better for huge projects like Wikipedia, while PmWiki is more suitable if you run on a limited budget (both with regards to hardware and admin time) and don't need to handle huge loads.

DanielS
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re: Wiki?

Post by DanielS » Thu Jun 15, 2006 5:31 am

That's a great idea, several other forums I visit have a Wiki and it helps newbies out immensely. With cumulative editing and revising, knowledge quickly accumulates. I would love to have a Wiki for this site.

Viv
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Re: Wiki?

Post by Viv » Tue Nov 09, 2010 3:45 pm

Time to bring the Wiki thread back to top of the how to improve this web site list and get it back in to the topic of conversation.

Viv
"Sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them" Brock Clarke

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tufty
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Re: Wiki?

Post by tufty » Wed Nov 10, 2010 7:20 pm

The problem with a wiki "pure and simple" is that you have to have a group of people who will "own" it. That means a whole lot of drudge work eliminating spam. That tends to dry people out pretty damn fast on a small project, or turn them into a cross between hannibal lecter and a hall monitor on bigger ones (see wikipediareview.com for numerous examples).

I originally formulated the "eliminating spam" thing above as "eliminating spam and crap", but in *theory*, the crap should get auto-filtered. That doesn't always work, even on a project with a lot of eyes - I could point to many pages on wikipedia as examples (my personal best was an obscure South American butterfly drinking blood and having a 7 metre wingspan for over a year, and the first vandalism fix only got rid of the blood drinking...).

Wikis *can* work. C2.com's "Portland Pattern Wiki" is one of the first and most famous wikis to really take off, but it has a membership of almost exclusively highly reknowned software people, most of whom think along much the same lines. In most cases, though, wikis wither and drift off into a neverland of penile enhancement spam.

I'd suggest the time would be better spent sifting the goldmine that is this (and the old) forum, and providing hotlinks to the posts and threads of interest for the lazy.

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Re: Wiki?

Post by Viv » Thu Nov 11, 2010 1:26 am

Hi Simon

yes all good points, folk are the problem in Wiki and here it seems ;-) I have to say as well I would not be brave enough to see an unlimited pass for page creation and editing rights (shudders slightly at the thought;-)

Any way to limit it and the potential for penis pills? or is there another model to get information posted in a usable way?

Viv
"Sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them" Brock Clarke

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