Hi,

there has been no objection in this thread[1], that the current D wiki is a burden and should be replaced. The only two proposals were the wiki engine build inside github (gollum[2], free software) and a Mediawiki instance like Haskell.

[1] http://forum.dlang.org/thread/k6jak1$quh$1@digitalmars.com [2] https://github.com/github/gollum

I propose to go forward with the gollum proposal and enable the wiki functionality in the d-programming-language.org github project[3]. In addition it might also be a good idea to enable issues in the same project to track website and wiki related issues.

[3] https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/d-programming-language.org

Github is a proprietary, non-free, cloud service. But it allows you to export all your data. There's the debian package github-backup[5] that one can run by cron to clone all data (wiki, issues) related to a github project.

http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/github-backup.html

Afterwards I'd kindly ask the current wiki4d[5] maintainer Helmut Leitner to add a static notice to all wiki4d pages pointing to the new wiki.

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

Do you agree?

Regards, Thomas Koch

On Wednesday, 7 November 2012 at 07:45:19 UTC, Thomas Koch wrote:
> Do you agree?

I still think Mediawiki is the better choice than Gollum if we want a full-fledged wiki. As far as I can see it, a large part of the dissatisfaction with the current wiki is precisely that it doesn't support many of the convenient features people have come to expect from modern wiki software. But Gollum seems to support even less features than the prowiki.org software.

For example, Andrej mentioned above how annoying it was that the prowiki.org search doesn't work properly. Well, Gollum as running on github.com doesn't seem to support search at all!

Or take user management: MediaWiki supports an extensive set of tools for setting permission, banning users, protecting pages, etc., which is proven to work in the real world. On the other hand, I don't think that Gollum, due to its nature, supports any kind of access control besides restricting wiki access to, in our case, d-programming-language.org contributors. This is a problem because an important part of the wiki concept is that everybody can edit all/most of the pages, _without_ prior review. For this to work, you also need to be able to take measures against vandalism.

And for people just browsing the web for information about D, the fact that you can access the wiki pages as a Git repository with Gollum is simply not important at all (offline reading is also possible with MediaWiki, by the way, as commonly done with Wikipedia on mobile devices before the ubiquity of high-speed mobile internet connections).

Well, it could quite possibly be that I am biased since I have a non-trivial number of contributions on two language editions of Wikipedia, but I still think that while the GitHub wiki is nice for having one or two pages of documentation with a few links for an open source project with zero effort, if we want a full-blown wiki for collecting and organization information about D, MediaWiki would be the best bet.

It would certainly help to reduce the »awkwardness factor« of the current solution – after all, it is used by Wikipedia, many Linux distributions (Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Suse, …), KDE, OpenOffice, and many other open source projects. Compared to it, most instances of other wiki systems almost invariably feel like a pile of mess to me.

David

David Nadlinger wrote:
> I still think Mediawiki is the better choice than Gollum if we want a full-fledged wiki. As far as I can see it, a large part of the dissatisfaction with the current wiki is precisely that it doesn't support many of the convenient features people have come to expect from modern wiki software. But Gollum seems to support even less features than the prowiki.org software.

Hi David,

as I said, I don't have a strong opinion here. I'd add "watched pages" as a missing feature in Gollum. On the other hand I've not yet found a solution to clone the content of a Mediawiki instance for offline reading and backup. (I'd much appreciate hints!)

The only show stopper of Mediawiki would be, if there was nobody to host and maintain it for D. Can you recommend a Mediawiki hosting service?

I'm a contributor to several Mediawiki instances myself and even while I'm hating PHP with a passion I'd still consider it for non-technical topics.

> For example, Andrej mentioned above how annoying it was that the prowiki.org search doesn't work properly. Well, Gollum as running on github.com doesn't seem to support search at all!
I could live without search. If I need it, I use Google with the "site:" parameter to search only the wiki.

> Or take user management: MediaWiki supports an extensive set of tools for setting permission, banning users, protecting pages, etc., which is proven to work in the real world. On the other hand, I don't think that Gollum, due to its nature, supports any kind of access control besides restricting wiki access to, in our case, d-programming-language.org contributors. This is a problem because an important part of the wiki concept is that everybody can edit all/most of the pages, _without_ prior review. For this to work, you also need to be able to take measures against vandalism.
There are two options: Only contributors can edit or everybody with a github account can edit. Only the latter makes sense for us. Public editing without a github account is not possile (AFAIK). The restriction to github accounts should provide sufficient protection against spam.

Best regards,

Thomas Koch

On Wednesday, 7 November 2012 at 16:01:52 UTC, Thomas Koch wrote:
> The only show stopper of Mediawiki would be, if there was nobody to host and
> maintain it for D. Can you recommend a Mediawiki hosting service?

This is a fair question I unfortunately don't have a good answer for. However, I was hoping that we could make the wiki "more official" by moving it to http://wiki.dlang.org anyway, so we might have a similar problem when e.g. going for Gollum.

David