Re: Emacs Wiki Revision History

[Xah <xahlee@gmail.com>]

Xah Lee wrote:
«I have been thinking for a while for doing this ... register a
domain, install MediaWiki, and copy emacswiki.org content over.»

On Oct 21, 5:04 am, ack <ackack1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> MediaWiki? You've got to be kidding. A database is by no means a
> requirement for such a thing as emacswiki (or most wiki's for that
> matter).
>
> Oddmuse works really quite well and it's text formatting is much nicer
> than that of MediaWiki in my opinion.
>
> You of course are free to do what you like, but for the love of all
> things good and nice, please choose some other wiki (almost any other
> wiki) than MediaWiki.

Wikipedia has been the world top most 10 visited site since about
2005. (see http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global )

«Wikipedia receives between 20,000 and 45,000 page requests per
second, depending on time of day.» — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

«English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1
April 2007» — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia

Media has a user base of few million times more than OddMuse. The
familiarity of users is important when it is of that magnitude.
Similarly, tools that works with MediaWiki is some hunderd, thousands,
times more, in various computing langs, than OddMuse.

please see also:
Emacs wiki Problems
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_wiki_problem.html

excerpt:

«
Emacs wiki Problems

The emacs wiki ( http://www.emacswiki.org/ ), started by Alex
Schroeder sometimes in 2005 or before, is great. However, i think it
could've been better.

(1) The wiki software used is Oddmuse, which is a perl script of 4k
lines, using flat files as database. As such, it is not comprehensive
or powerful.

(2) The content, is kinda haphazard. It is somewhat in-between of a
encyclopedia-style treatment like Wikipedia and a chaotic online
forum. Specifically, when you visit a article, half of article will be
dialogues between different users on tips or issues or preferences.

I commented to Alex about these problems. I suggest that it should use
the same software Wikipedia uses, the MediaWiki↗. So that, it is far
more powerful, with large scale programer support, and the user
interface for the wiki will be one that's widely known to millions of
users world-wide. (note: Oddmuse↗ is something written by Alex
himself, a pet love of sorts)

I also suggested that the writing guidelines should follow Wikipedia's
style. Specifically, the content editing should be one with the goal
of creating a comprehensive, coherent, article that gives readers info
or tutorial about the subject. (as opposed to, serving partly as a
online forum between emacs users and maintaining dialogue integrity)

I think there's a lot potential to emacs wiki. It could, for example,
develop into a comprehensive elisp library archive (e.g. CPAN↗).
Listing packages by category, with each package come with a article
that discuss its author, purpose, status, caveats, tutorial, similar
packages ...etc. And the packages needs not just be modes... but
libraries as in most languages. (for example, js2 and nxml modes are
both complete parsers for javascript and xml, each of thousands lines
of elisp code. They should actually be several libraries, so that
these parsers can be widely deployed as language modules, not confined
in use just in one editing mode. Such is largely not done in emacs/
elisp community due to emacs being primarily a text-editor with
relatively few elisp programers... but is slowing happening anyway (it
is something that eventually must happen). A good wiki can be great
help in ushering necessary improvements and increase the speed of
evolution.)

For the above to take shape, the wiki must adopt a style so that
articles aim to be a coherent treatment of the subject (as opposed to
dialogue and random tips). (and this is done by crafting the
contribution guidelines or rules; exemplarily done by Wikipedia) Also,
i'd think the wiki's software should adopt something widely supported
such as MediaWiki, as opposed to one-man's pet project.
»

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄