Re: [Caml-list] OCaml wiki

[Philippe Veber <philippe.veber@gmail.com>]

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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). 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 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" (I
couldn't see such a page on the website).



2012/12/21 Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com>

> A wiki could be good but I strongly encourage any such effort to integrate
> with 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) 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 got out of date.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, 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 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. 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>wrote:
>
>> Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@recoil.org> writes:
>>
>> > On 20 Dec 2012, at 23:31, Benedikt Meurer <
>> benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Dec 21, 2012, at 0:22 , Anil Madhavapeddy <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 site?
>> >>>
>> >>> I'm happy to run a wiki on the OCL infrastructure, but would strongly
>> >>> prefer contributions to the 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 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).
>>
>> 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 pages on github would be a good
>> entry point.
>>
>> [1] http://emacswiki.org/
>>
>> -Wojciech
>>
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>
>

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