Gaby, On August 1, 2006 12:40 AM you wrote: > ... > Why is having the front-page as wiki a plus? > For all I know, only a handful of people can actually modify > that page.
Although the FrontPage is the FrontPage of the Axiom Wiki, unlike other pages on the wiki, we decided not to let visitors modify it, otherwise we might be just a little to open to vandalism. So for the Axiom Wiki FrontPage it is true that only a handful of people can actually modify it. > For other pages, due to irritating spams, the system has made it > complicated for good citizens to contribute changes. Why do you think it is "complicated for good citizens to contribute changes"? I think it is very very significant (and disappointing to me) that you perceive the Axiom Wiki this way. What can we do to assure everyone that it fact that it is easy to contribute changes? Afterall, that is the main reason that it is a Wiki. > I don't see a difference between that and maintaining the website > files as part of the SVN or CVS repository. The latter seems > simpler to me -- but I'm not proposing it. Just observing. > ... This is another very important observation. I have to admit that contrary to my "great expectations" it seems to me that so far we have gained very little benefit from trying to maintain the Axiom website as a wiki. It is true (for the most part) that the maintenance of the contents of the Axiom web site (with the obvious exception of the live Axiom and Reduce interface) could have been done using CVS on Savannah or SourceForge. Contrary to the intent of the wiki, it seems that almost all of the contributions to the Axiom web site have been by people who are also active Axiom developers and are quite familiar with using tools like CVS. As I have said several times already, I am quite disappointed by the lack of active contributions to the Axiom Wiki. Perhaps people just do not have time or the motivation? I would be very surprised if the reason was because they found it difficult to do, although there does seem to be a considerable reluctance for people to view the web as a two-way media where they can (or even are expected to) contribute content. It seems to me that this is more a "cultural" issue than a technical one. In the last couple of years the only wildly successful wiki-based project that I can think of is Wikipedia. At the present time the only explanation I have for this is that apparently the ratio of the number of people willing to contribute to the number of people who just visit for information is very small - maybe as high as 1 out of 100,000. This would be consistant with the success of Wikipedia and also the level of contribution that we see in Axiom Wiki based on our month access statistics. Anyway, I would very much like to hear from other Axiom developers about the issue of whether it makes sense to continue to try to maintain the main Axiom web site as a Wiki. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
