Hi,

I wanted to edit something in the D wiki[1], had a problem and learned more about the used wiki engine ProWiki.

[1] http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d

 - The last ProWiki release was in 2006
 - This was also the first open source release
 - Prowiki was apparently developed only by Helmut Leitner
 - The project is dead by all standards

I consider it extremely important for the success of D to have a usable wiki. I don't consider the current wiki usable. I don't have a strong opinion about other wiki engines so I won't give a recommendation here.

I personally would prefer a wiki system based on Git to allow offline editing, like Ikiwiki.

I don't know the history of the wiki, but it might be adequate to thank Helmut Leitner for his work and efforts.

Best regards, Thomas Koch

Thomas Koch:

> I personally would prefer a wiki system based on Git to allow offline editing, like Ikiwiki.

The Haskell community uses this one, that I have found nice to
read:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell

Bye,
bearophile

On Sunday, 28 October 2012 at 13:06:09 UTC, Thomas Koch wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I wanted to edit something in the D wiki[1], had a problem and learned more
> about the used wiki engine ProWiki.
>
> [1] http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d
>
>  - The last ProWiki release was in 2006
>  - This was also the first open source release
>  - Prowiki was apparently developed only by Helmut Leitner
>  - The project is dead by all standards
>
> I consider it extremely important for the success of D to have a usable
> wiki. I don't consider the current wiki usable. I don't have a strong
> opinion about other wiki engines so I won't give a recommendation here.
>
> I personally would prefer a wiki system based on Git to allow offline
> editing, like Ikiwiki.
>
> I don't know the history of the wiki, but it might be adequate to thank
> Helmut Leitner for his work and efforts.
>
> Best regards, Thomas Koch

What about the wiki engine build into github?

Tobias Pankrath wrote:
> What about the wiki engine build into github?
The wiki engine is called Gollum[1] and is itself free software. The wiki is
editable via the web interface and offline with a text editor. It supports
half a douzend popular markups, including markdown, org-mode, restructured
text, creole.
Of course the wiki could be hosted as a wiki to a separate dummy project
under https://github.com/D-Programming-Language. Please don't make it a wiki
for the dmd project since D is more then one compiler implementation.

Even for me as a free software advocate I'd favour this quick github solution over the current state. It's still possible at any time to setup an own instance of Gollum and host the wiki somewhere else.

[1] https://github.com/github/gollum

Best regards,

Thomas Koch

On Sunday, 28 October 2012 at 13:06:09 UTC, Thomas Koch wrote:
> I consider it extremely important for the success of D to have a usable
> wiki. I don't consider the current wiki usable. I don't have a strong
> opinion about other wiki engines so I won't give a recommendation here.
>
> I personally would prefer a wiki system based on Git to allow offline
> editing, like Ikiwiki.

Yes, I agree that the current wiki setup is very awkward and clumsy to use.

However, my preferred solution would just be a MediaWiki instance (with a slightly customized theme, of course), because this is what everybody is already familiar with from Wikipedia and other wiki sites.

David

On Wednesday, 31 October 2012 at 13:09:10 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
> On Sunday, 28 October 2012 at 13:06:09 UTC, Thomas Koch wrote:
>> I consider it extremely important for the success of D to have a usable
>> wiki. I don't consider the current wiki usable. I don't have a strong
>> opinion about other wiki engines so I won't give a recommendation here.
>>
>> I personally would prefer a wiki system based on Git to allow offline
>> editing, like Ikiwiki.
>
> Yes, I agree that the current wiki setup is very awkward and clumsy to use.
>
> However, my preferred solution would just be a MediaWiki instance (with a slightly customized theme, of course), because this is what everybody is already familiar with from Wikipedia and other wiki sites.
>
> David

If it's just the syntax: gollum understands mediawiki. The advantages I see are no need to setup and administrate a custom solution and the core people of the D community are already using git.

That I don't need to use a crappy web interface if I don't want to is a big plus, too.

On Sun, 28 Oct 2012 14:06:08 +0100
Thomas Koch <thomas@koch.ro> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I wanted to edit something in the D wiki[1], had a problem and learned more about the used wiki engine ProWiki.
> 
> [1] http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d
> 
>  - The last ProWiki release was in 2006
>  - This was also the first open source release
>  - Prowiki was apparently developed only by Helmut Leitner
>  - The project is dead by all standards
> 
> I consider it extremely important for the success of D to have a usable wiki. I don't consider the current wiki usable. I don't have a strong opinion about other wiki engines so I won't give a recommendation here.
> 
> I personally would prefer a wiki system based on Git to allow offline editing, like Ikiwiki.
> 
> I don't know the history of the wiki, but it might be adequate to thank Helmut Leitner for his work and efforts.
> 
> Best regards, Thomas Koch

I don't really understand what's wrong with the current system (other than the engine apparently being dead as you say...well, and that it rejects user names that have only one capital letter as supposedly not being camel-cased). But if there's a lot of people who feel this way about it (and I don't know - are there?), then that could explain it's tendency to not get updated, in which case maybe it should be changed to something else.

What do you mean by "offline editing" though? I'm not a fan of web interfaces in general either, but a wiki is a website, so I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I guess I haven't used ones of these offline editing wikis, unless you count committing/pushing a 'README.md' to github. Do you just mean something that has a published HTTP API (like REST or something) so that arbitrary non-web interfaces can be created?

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> I don't really understand what's wrong with the current system
- unfamiliar syntax like no other wiki engine I've ever seen
- no way to have site names without a camelCase
- no history other then precedent version
- no watched pages
- ... surely much more if you try to really use it

> What do you mean by "offline editing" though?
Go to https://github.com/gtkd-developers/GtkD/wiki/_access
You can git clone the whole content of the wiki, read offline, edit offline
and push back to the online wiki.
Other systems that allow that are for example ikiwiki, gitit and others

On 10/28/12, Thomas Koch <thomas@koch.ro> wrote:
> [1] http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d

Also it has a rather weak search system. I often can't find pages even when I directly search for their titles. There's also the constant spam issue. If the wiki was somehow based on Git we could review pull requests before merging which would eliminate spam (+ we could put that "edit this page" button (on dlang.org) for wiki pages)

Am Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:53:26 +0100
schrieb Thomas Koch <thomas@koch.ro>:

> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > I don't really understand what's wrong with the current system
> - unfamiliar syntax like no other wiki engine I've ever seen
+1. I think having markdown support would be a huge plus as most D developers are already familiar with markdown syntax (github).

> - no way to have site names without a camelCase
> - no history other then precedent version
I think I managed to get the history of a wiki page, but I can't remember how I did it. The interface is not very intuitive.

> - no watched pages
> - ... surely much more if you try to really use it
> 
> > What do you mean by "offline editing" though?
> Go to https://github.com/gtkd-developers/GtkD/wiki/_access
> You can git clone the whole content of the wiki, read offline, edit
> offline and push back to the online wiki.

I like to have a preview when editing wiki pages (no wysiwyg though), but as long as we have both online / offline editing that's no problem.
> Other systems that allow that are for example ikiwiki, gitit and others
>