Re: Emacs Wiki Revision History

[Alex Schroeder <kensanata@gmail.com>]

> On Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:55:22 -0700 (PDT), Xah <xahlee <at> gmail.com> said:
> Xah> (2) The content, is kinda haphazard. It is somewhat in-between of
> Xah> a encyclopedia-style treatment like Wikipedia and a chaotic
> Xah> online forum. Specifically, when you visit a article, half of
> Xah> article will be dialogues between different users on tips or
> Xah> issues or preferences.

Paul R <paul.r.ml <at> gmail.com> writes:
> This is the only statement I can agree with.

Indeed, I agree with this statement as well. But that is as it should
be: The
wiki is broken as specified in this respect.

What follows is a short rant on what the Emacs Wiki is and is not. :)

For Emacs, I don't care about a perfect wiki that can replace the
manual. Emacs
is and remains the self-documenting editor. As such, the good stuff,
the well
explained stuff, the carefully thought out stuff, the edited and
checked stuff
should go into the manual -- either the Emacs manual, or the Emacs
Lisp Manual,
or the Emacs Lisp Introduction. I don't care. When I set up the wiki I
was
frustrated with how slow the FAQ was changing and the endless
repetitions on the
newsgroups and mailing lists. That's where the wiki fits in: It
changes faster
than the FAQ, it has less repetitions than the newsgroups and mailing
lists, but
it is not as structured and honed as the manual is.

Comparing it to the Wikipedia, where the wiki is the real thing, or to
the Emacs
manual, is a no brainer. Of course it doesn't compare. But it doesn't
have to.
The wiki is in a separate category.

And of course the Emacs Wiki has the benefit of letting other people
put their
text where their mouth is: If people like Xah feel that the text of
the wiki is
lacking in quality, feel free to step up and work on it. Just like
Free
Software, complaining is far less effective than doing.

The only thing I will oppose very strongly is the setting up of
guidelines and
requirements and all sorts of foolish rules, because that doesn't
improve the
text. It just prevents other people from posting. Way to go, social
skills.

This is the end of the rant.

> But AFAICT, Alex has been
> most of the time on his own to create and maintain emacswiki software.
> I guess he would welcome some help concerning hosting, development or
> administration.

Actually I am quite happy with how things are going. I spend very
little time on
Emacs Wiki specific things. I like working on my wiki engine; I use it
for other
projects including my homepage, my dad's blog, and so on. If somebody
feels the
urge to write an extension that we should use for Emacs Wiki, feel
free to step
forward. As the spam problem is very much under control at the moment,
there's
also very little to do for administrators. Hosting is costing me EUR
20 a month
which isn't so bad. I'd feel ridiculous accepting donations for that.
I'd rather
people donated to some charity or joined the FSF. Or -- even better --
people
could donate time and energy by improving the actual text on Emacs
Wiki. That's
much more important than the software.

> Alex, have you considered using a third party wiki engine for emacs
> wiki before?

No, never. I use my own software because I know exactly what it does,
I have
full control over the code, and I feel very comfortable extending it.
Switching
to something else would mean more work for me. That's why I suggested
that
anybody interested in it set up their own site, start mirroring Emacs
Wiki page
content, look at all the background jobs, redirects, URL rewrite
rules, text
formatting rules, etc. And when they're finished, handing over the
domain name
will be a trivial thing by comparison.

But I'm not willing to do the work for somebody else. They need to do
it themselves.

> In the meantime, thank you Alex for running emacswiki, a precious
> ressource.

Thanks! :)