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from, and it eventually got out of date.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>>
<
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
>>>
>>> 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
>
> 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