[Glastonbury] more wiki

[Martin Wheeler]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2004, Alan Pope wrote:

> The big benefit with wikis is the edit-ability. Anyone anywhere can
> add/change/delete anything they like. If they make a typo, so what,
> someone else will pick it up later..

Absolutely.  That's the principal reason I've been using them for years.
(But my application of them is not quite the usual one.)  They're superb 
for *community* activities, where the reultant website is a conglomerate 
of separate items, and //it doesn't matter//; but the way I use them now 
is for websites where the end result is intended to be a monolithic block 
-- and of course, they're not really good at that.

> It's great, I'm a fan, but I'm a fan because I've used it a lot.

Likewise.
Andy Cater and I used one to edit the Linux Distributions HOWTO for a 
couple of years, until the pace of appearance/disappearance of 
distributions became just too much to cope with, even using a wiki.  And 
the other great problem was the fact that we really wanted to output SGML; 
which the wiki couldn't handle.  (Or produce.)
I also hosted the Linux dictionary on one for a year and a half -- all 
10,000 items of it! -- which was a laugh and a half. (Just transferring 
the thing from Australia to my machine using a 56k modem at each end was 
a fun project in itself -- it had been created as a single text document.)
But the wiki turned out to be a great means of browsing through it from 
three continents, and copy-editing as we went.

BUT .. the big problem always was not being able to get an overview of the 
total document ('the big picture') without creating too many levels of 
nested pages.
(This isn't a problem for 'community of interests' sites.)


> Seriously Martin, have a look at the HantsLUG wiki
> http://www.hants.lug.org.uk/ we have massive amounts of information in
> there, nicely structured, and *automatically* searchable.

Have done; thanks for the link.
I hope others on the list have had a look also, and gleaned a few ideas 
for what we might do within this group along the same lines. I rather like 
sopme of the things you have on the site -- although we're a slightly more 
anarchic group here.    (aka: suffering 'The Glastonbury Effect')

I'm in two minds as to whether a wiki or a CMS is the best tool for us to 
use to communicate both within and outwith the group; hence the plethora 
of tools being demoed at the moment. We should have a couple of versions 
of Mambo to play with soon -- the big problem I'm having with CMSes at the 
moment is the difficulty of upgrading the size of database one develops 
after say two years of operation.  This is no joke, if the software has 
changed the names of the majority of the fields, etc. (That's why we give 
it to Sean to do -- he eats that stuff for breakfast.)
Of course, that's no problem with a wiki.
But today's CMSes which allow personal weblog pages, as well as overall 
editing control, seem to be just the thing. (That's why I like 
phpWebSite.)  Thoughts, anyone?


> We have
> suffered in the past with spammers from the far east (I wouldn't go as
> far as you have on your wiki - I think they're just spammers plain and
> simple)

I have a *very* short fuse at times (the big fat laughing Santa image is 
just a front) -- and that was a *very* bad day.  I actually spent some 
time tracking down as far as I could where it was all coming from -- and 
eventually realised it was a spambot, originating in Novo Sibirsk.
So then I got bored; and let the invective flow.  (I've now clobbered the 
spambot -- so my access logfile tells me.)

Anyway -- any reactions from other members of the group?
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
mwheeler at startext.co.uk                http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
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