> I've personally never been a fan of Wiki - I love the concept. I just don't > feel comfortable with it - so I'd like to move away for it - if Waikato > wouldn't mind, perhaps we could use some of their wiki content as a platform > to start a more formal documentation project than a wiki, but less formal > than TLDP. When I first started the wiki I didn't think it would work out. I thought that people would Spam it, we wouldn't get critical mass behind it for people to use it. It would contain lots of rubbish and very little content. The only reason I gave it a shot was because I saw how successful the c2 wiki was ( http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors ) and how it didn't seem to have the problems I thought there would be. So I gave it a go with my "little" test to see what would happen. The WLUG wiki was originally started by me one long weekend in 2002 ( http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/wlug/2002-June/002526.html )[1] as a place to put annotations on man pages and to start updating the howto documents that were horribly out of date (almost exactly your original proposal). I started by running phpwiki with a few simple local customisations on my home DSL. I imported all the man pages from my computer, and all the howto's from the TLDP and encouraged people to update them to contain any information that they'd be keen on. What really happened was that nobody really edited the manpages/howtos except me (I've done a job of cleaning up section 2 of the man pages (eg: http://www.wlug.org.nz/fstat(2), one day I'll merge our changes upstream, one day. ). I went through created hyperlinks for stuff, wrote wiki pages for signals and errno values, and wrote some example code demonstrating features. Then about "s" I got bored and gave up. I still write pages on programming topics as I find things that don't have good examples/descriptions on the web. AFAIK the pages I wrote for the various signals ( http://www.wlug.org.nz/SIGSEGV ) and errno's ( http://www.wlug.org.nz/ETXTBSY ) are one of only a few real pages on the net describing what they mean. Meanwhile everyone else was busy writing wiki pages for problems they had and what the solutions were. People asking me questions would be told after the answer that they now had to go write a wiki page about what they learnt ( http://www.wlug.org.nz/IsomerMadeMeDoThis ). This quickly meant we built up a whole heap of pages covering little things that people wish they knew but had never seen written down anywhere. ( http://www.wlug.org.nz/CategoryNotes ). Some of these pages became extremely useful and popular ( http://www.wlug.org.nz/MostPopular ). Some even became the definitive source of information on the subject ( http://wiki.openswan.org/index.php/CiscoPIX ). Others are just weird cultural references ( http://wlug.org.nz/V ). The WLUG wiki currently averages about 50,000 hits a day ( http://wlug.org.nz/webalizer/ ). We eventually moved the wiki off my home DSL onto other machines, eventually ending up with it's present location running on the WLUG server, where it has been ever since. One of the major things that the wiki has going for it is a great culture. We have lots of people watching RecentChanges/RecentEdits ( http://www.wlug.org.nz/RecentChanges / http://www.wlug.org.nz/RecentEdits ) like a hawk and tidying up entries rapidly (cleaning up formatting, spelling, grammar, tpyo's, misunderstandings and errors etc). We consistently have several edits a day which means our wiki is steadily growing in size. We have a culture to wiki all answers to any question that comes up in case we ever need to know it again, or if we find a neat link to add it to the wiki so that others may find it and use it too. The wiki has over 7000 pages in it's index, over 3000 of those have been hand written from scratch by anyone who passes our very simple IQ test of asking people for their name[2] ( http://www.wlug.org.nz/People ). We have made heaps of changes to our wiki software, mostly to defeat spammers, to customise it to our uses, and to make it more search engine friendly ( http://www.wlug.org.nz/WlugWikiConversion#hdr_modifications_we_have_made ) If you really do want to go your own way and do something like this I'd recommend: * Have a wiki for notes. Nothing beats them. You can jot down a few lines, and people will come and clean them up, annotate them and generally improve whatever you said. The problem of abuse does arise sometimes, but by having a good culture of people who militantly look at every change (it's a great way to learn!) we very quickly see people who are stupid and revert their changes. Each page has a history kept for several days (or several revisions whatever is larger) so nothing is ever truly lost ( http://www.wlug.org.nz/HomePage?action=PageHistory ). * Don't try and clone TLDP/Manpages. Thats what the WLUG Wiki was supposed to be. It never was. People use "man" to read manpages, and nobody reads official TLDP Howto's anymore, they use Google and find a page that sounds authoritative and follow that. So write authoritative sounding pages rather than trying to update out of date TLDP howtos. If you really must, try cloning php.net's comment system for manpages, but thats about it, it doesn't seem to work well in a wiki environment. The low barrier to entry is what makes it easy to wiki a few lines here and there when you find the answer to a problem and therefore makes the wiki grow, anything more rigorous than asking for someones name makes it too easy to think "I'll do that later" and stifles growth. What I'd really recommend is doing a "NZLUG" branded view into the WLUG Wiki (like we did with the http://nzlug.wlug.org.nz joke site). We've proven that it's practical (we hacked it in during the about 1 hour, 30 minutes between the first post from Nevyn on the topic and the time Jamie posted the link to the list. The site is fully functional: have a look around. http://nzlug.wlug.org.nz/CategoryCategory try editing http://nzlug.wlug.org.nz/SandBox ). It just needs a better hostname (wiki.Linux.net.nz?) and some work on the theme (WLUG is currently in the process of working on tiding up our own theme for the main http://www.wlug.org.nz/ site). You get the advantages of a strong wiki culture to help maintain the website, a boatload of rich content already there, hosting is already provided, and there are a bunch of people very keen on maintaining it. All NZLUG has to do is add content when they find something interesting. It's Win/Win for NZLUG! >Anyway, back to the subject - any keen at all? or am I just starting some >other flame war? > > Heh, Bring on the flame wars! This is something that WLUG has been doing for over 3 years now, and while what we've got isn't what you asked for, I think it's what you want. The Wiki is probably our most valuable resource after our members, it contains the distilled knowledge of not only our members, but people in the general Linux community. Questions are often answerable by a link to the wiki and the quip "The Wiki Knows All". If the wiki doesn't know what you need to know, when you find the answer, wiki it so that other people can find it (actually, more importantly so you can find it yourself when you have to figure out how you solved that problem last time). Try this wikiing thing on our wiki, we love people to come and add new content. Think of some problems you've had recently and add them to the wiki, learn how it works, and why it works. Have a look around at what content we have already. You'll be pleasantly surprised. You want a wiki. You just don't know it yet. :) -- [1]: Funny story, My insistence at getting the wiki working meant I didn't stop typing when I should have, and that I believe was the major contributing factor for me having to seek medical help at the time for my sore wrists. Nothing was permanently damaged, and now I'm a wiser person. If your wrists hurt even a little bit STOP TYPING. My wrists have been fine for about 2.75 years now without even the slightest hint of pain, so the story is funny in retrospect as opposed to a painful lesson for others. [2]: This seems to be extremely successful at thwarting those that shouldn't comment and spammers, although we still get lots of people who think that when we ask for someone's "real name" we mean something else. ------------------------------------------------------------------- To remove yourself from this list, email nzlug-request@linux.net.nz with "unsubscribe" in the body of the message.
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