Re: [Caml-list] OCaml wiki

[Fermin Reig <ferminreig@fastmail.fm>]

For what it's worth, haskell.org is a wiki and the contents is of good 
quality and well organised. Guidelines for contributing are available at 
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/HaskellWiki:Contributing

On 21/12/12 08:37, Philippe Veber wrote:
> For what it's worth, my opinion is also that we should focus our 
> efforts on the website, especially now that we have something that we 
> can be proud of (kudos to all those behind ocaml.org 
> <http://ocaml.org>). As the development of the website showed very 
> well, it takes a really high amount of time and tenacious work to do 
> something useful *and* acknowledged. I think there is a limited 
> man-power in the community to advertise and document our favorite 
> language, let's not split it up but rather pour it into a single, 
> high-quality and carefully reviewed contents. I feel the best 
> achievement of ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org> is to exist as a central 
> place where to add ocaml material, improving the readability of ocaml 
> as a whole, and the visibility of ocaml projects. Pushing to a git 
> repo is more difficult than adding stuff on a wiki, but we nerds don't 
> really care about that, right ;o)?
>
> So yes, the only benefit I see for the wiki is to lower the barrier 
> for contributions. It is true (I tried this morning) that it is not 
> straightforward to contribute to the site for those who do not use 
> opam and git everyday (not to mention that you have to know HTML 
> basics). But with a proper documentation, using git to contribute the 
> website is not so difficult, and has lots of (editorial) benefits. 
> Plus that way we help people to learn those anyway useful 
> technologies. Unless someone wants to write it, I can have a try at 
> writing a page "Contributing to ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org>" (I 
> couldn't see such a page on the website).
>
>
>
> 2012/12/21 Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com 
> <mailto:agarwal1975@gmail.com>>
>
>     A wiki could be good but I strongly encourage any such effort to
>     integrate with ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org>, and to carefully
>     weigh the pros and cons. Wikis make contributions easier, but you
>     need someone to keep the content organized and do some basic
>     quality control. Also, the structure of the documentation is not
>     very customizable. The question is whether pushing to a git repo
>     (the current contribution method for ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org>)
>     is so much harder (given that we're all programmers after all).
>
>     The tutorials page is a good candidate for converting to wiki
>     format, but remember that a wiki is where all this content came
>     from, and it eventually got out of date. We could create
>     wiki.ocaml.org <http://wiki.ocaml.org>, but then the question is
>     how to make it integrate nicely with the rest of the pages that
>     don't fit the wiki model.
>
>     Finally, which wiki software to use? None are very good, and who
>     amongst us is keen to hack into php code. My initial goal for
>     ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org> was to use ocsigen and ocsimore, but
>     there is a big upfront cost in getting such a site implemented.
>
>     Whatever the community decides, we can support and integrate with
>     ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org>. My only strong opinion is please
>     don't build a separate unrelated site, with duplication of effort
>     and and fragmentation of content.
>
>
>     On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 6:50 PM, Wojciech Meyer
>     <wojciech.meyer@gmail.com <mailto:wojciech.meyer@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>         Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@recoil.org <mailto:anil@recoil.org>>
>         writes:
>
>         > On 20 Dec 2012, at 23:31, Benedikt Meurer
>         <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com
>         <mailto:benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com>> wrote:
>         >>
>         >> On Dec 21, 2012, at 0:22 , Anil Madhavapeddy
>         <anil@recoil.org <mailto:anil@recoil.org>> wrote:
>         >>
>         >>> Personally, I've got mixed feelings about wikis from
>         experience with
>         >>> previous projects, since they get out of date very rapidly
>         indeed. They
>         >>> do work well if someone's maintaining it, but if that's
>         the case, why
>         >>> not just push these tips and guides to the existing
>         ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org> site?
>         >>>
>         >>> I'm happy to run a wiki on the OCL infrastructure, but
>         would strongly
>         >>> prefer contributions to the ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org>
>         Git repo with all this good stuff
>         >>> instead!  If it really turns out we need a swanky wiki,
>         that can be arranged
>         >>> later...
>         >>
>         >> Why not use the wiki provided by Github for the ocaml.org
>         <http://ocaml.org> project?
>         >
>         > That works too; Thomas has written a Github Markdown to HTML
>         converter in
>         > COW [1], and is using that to generate the OPAM website from
>         the Github
>         > wiki (for the documentation that you see on
>         opam.ocamlpro.com <http://opam.ocamlpro.com>).
>
>         Yes, we could use github pages as long as they are searchable,
>         I see no
>         problem with it. I think the biggest advantage of wiki would
>         be that
>         everything would be in single place and hyperlinked.
>
>         As for protecting the wiki from being up-date emacswiki [1] is
>         always a
>         great example that it is possible as long as people maintain their
>         webpages. Also, I feel that ocaml.org <http://ocaml.org> pages
>         on github would be a good
>         entry point.
>
>         [1] http://emacswiki.org/
>
>         -Wojciech
>
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