[e-lang] Wiki?

[James Graves]

Mark S. Miller wrote:
> James Graves wrote:
> > I've never been impressed with C2.  They are using ancient, crufty wiki 
> > software.  And worse yet, the community standards weren't very strong at 
> > the start.  As a result, you have people in the habit of scribbling 
> > whatever they think, anywhere, without much consideration of the overall 
> > system.  It is the broken windows theory, all over again.
> 
> <amusing-but-off-topic-note>
> I followed you there until the end. "Broken windows theory"? I thought, "What 
> does this have to do with Hazlett's "Economics in One Lesson"? A bit of web 
> searching led me to realize that I had not known about "broken windows 
> theory". That it is interesting. And that I never knew I didn't known it, 
> because till now, I always assumed people were talking about (what I now see 
> is properly called) the "parable of the broken window".
> </amusing-but-off-topic-note>

Whoops.  If this is what you're talking about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

That's not what I intended to convey.  There's a 2nd "theory of broken
windows" relating to "community spirit".

This is discussed in Dubner and Levitt's "Freakonomics" and Gladwell's
"The Tipping Point".

For one side of the argument:

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2006/03/thoughts_on_fre.html

> Yes. Many parts of C2 are good, but many aren't. The Haskell wiki is 
> impressive. I notice that a login is required to edit.

I'm kind of torn about this.  On the one hand, allowing anonymous edits
lowers further the barrier to entry, encouraging more people to edit.
It also makes it easier to valdalize.

I'm thinking it would be best to allow anonymous edits (which are
tracked by IP address anyway) at first, and perhaps consider disabling
that later if it seems to be a problem.

> I like MediaWiki. TWiki looks good but less familiar. Due to Wikipedia, 
> MediaWiki's look and feel is now associated with authoritative
> content. So, by broken windows theory, perhaps we should adopt
> MediaWiki in order to signal the right message?

Works for me.  I've got a couple MediaWiki sites running for my company.
Though I haven't done much about them lately.  Though I need to upgrade
them anyway.

> What wiki does www.haskell.org use?

They're using MediaWiki... I recognize the format of the special pages.
Someone spent a fair amount of time customizing the layout.  It has a
nice clean look, whereas wikipedia.org is looking increasingly
cluttered and "busy".

Ideally, it would look cleaner and simpler to anonymous users, and then
allow logged-in users to customize the look further.  That's not
possible with the current software, and would be a great deal of work to
implement.

> > 2. Good starting point.  Setting up a blank wiki isn't very effective. 
> > It is necessary to 'seed' the wiki with a decent chunk of good content. 
> >     You have this already; large chunks of erights.org can be wikified 
> > and imported.
> 
> How much of this can be automated?

Well, all of it... if we are sufficiently clever.

Years ago when I was importing vectorsite.net articles into Wikipedia, I
did it all by hand, which was fun because the articles themselves are
interesting.

There may be tools to help import HTML into the MediaWiki markup.  If
you've got higher-level source (such as LaTeX) that may even better.

I haven't found many tools so far:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools#Import:_Conversion_from_other_formats

> > I could potentially host a wiki, but it would be at the far end of a 
> > puny ADSL line.
> 
> I think that would be adequate for now, so I'd like to take you up on that.
> Thank you very much!

OK, I'll try to get that going in the next couple weeks.

> > There are some papers that discuss how and why wikis work.  I can 
> > provide pointers if needed.
> 
> Yes, I'd be interested. Thanks.

Ooookay... and I though I knew where links to those papers are, but I
can't find them right now.  Maybe I was imaging that there was actual
research.  Sorry.

I did find a kind of textbook on them however:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science:Introduction

And here's a better discussion of broken window theory as it relates to
wikis:

http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/date/2005/06/the-broken-wiki-theory/

James Graves