Re: [Caml-list] OCaml wiki

[Siraaj Khandkar <siraaj@khandkar.net>]

+1

Wiki is a fun concept, but is a complete mess in practice.

It has some versioning capabilities, but not nearly as sophisticated as a DVCS
such as Git. Obviously, there're editing capabilities, but not nearly as
productive as your favorite text editor.

Why force suboptimal tools on people that are interested in an optimal
programming language? ;)

Now, what about the maintainers? How do they even begin to keep track of tiny
edits to 1000's of wiki pages? Queueing theory to the rescue! A pull request
queue gives them a chance to audit the contributions in a sane manner (without
wasting their volunteered time).


On Dec 20, 2012, at 9:49 PM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 got out of date.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 previous projects, since they get out of date very rapidly indeed.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

-- 
Siraaj Khandkar
.o.
..o
ooo