From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Russ Cox" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20001129080400.1134A199E1@mail.cse.psu.edu> Subject: [9fans] (no subject) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 03:03:55 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 33a8fb7e-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 subect: swikis Is anyone interested in setting up a Plan 9 wiki/swiki? Does anyone know what they are? A Wiki is a collaborative web server: the pages are world-writable with a history, and anyone who doesn't like or wants to add to a page, create new pages, etc., can do so. The theory is that if you see something wrong or not as complete as it could be, you fix it. Apparently it works quite well most of the time. The history function means that if someone comes a long and "destroys" everything, someone else can just come along and restore it. This apparently rarely happens. The Squeak people (Smalltalk hackers) seem to have the most common implementation, which they call a swiki. I've been poking around the various Squeak-related ones for a while and am quite impressed. I even fixed a few broken links while I was poking around. http://pbl.cc.gatech.edu/myswiki/107 is a decent jumping off point for learning about them. I think that such a server dedicated to explaining various things for new Plan 9 users would be a tremendous help. The great thing is that it can start small and as people find questions not answered they can add them (and then the answers when they find them), and it evolves as is useful, without the hassle of a central person maintaining it, as is the case with FAQs and the like. (You might think of this as FAQ-o-matic on steroids, I believe.) They're apparently very easy to set up: they run anywhere Squeak does, which is Mac, Windows, and most Unixes. Russ