On September 06, 2006 8:54 AM David Harvey wrote: > ... > It would be utterly insane to have the SAGE code available > to edit wiki-style. > ...
I would like to comment on Tom Boothby's vision of how a wiki with an interface to Sage might be beneficial to the develop of Sage as a software project. The intention, as I understand it, would be to maintain a version the actual source code and documentation for Sage as "pages" on the wiki. Changes to the contents of source code pages modified by open access over the web would become part of a live collaborative online test environment. Plus a channel would be provided whereby these changes could be selectively incorporated into the official Sage distribution. The wiki pages would also contain live Sage calculations - such as is possible in the current NoteBook interface - that could be used to incorporate illustrations of features and issues in the documentation in a dynamic manner. In fact the Axiom project has made the entire source code of Axiom available over the web in precisely this way for the last year. And has operated a wiki able to display the results of Axiom calculations for more than two years. See for example: http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/axiom--test--1 Axiom source code is written in a "literate programming" style based on noweb and LaTeX called "pamphlets" which enables "chunks" of source code to be named, referenced in discussion in the text, and assembled into executable programs. The Axiom wiki is able to store the source of each pamphlet as an object embedded in an editable wiki page and to render it in various document formats (dvi, pdf, ps) as well as extract code chunks on demand. Discussion and illustrative calculations can be freely attached to wiki pages containing pamphlet objects. As the chief designer of the web site that is currently used to support Axiom, Tom's suggestions seem very welcome to me. But the fact is that these features of the Axiom wiki web site have not been extensively used to Axiom developers and users and remain essentially only an experimental aspect of the web site. > > On Sep 6, 2006, at 1:46 PM, Tom Boothby wrote: > > > I see wikipedia as a great success in open authoring. Most > > mischievous edits are caught pretty quickly. I don't think > > that SAGE would be much different -- just to a smaller scale. > In my opinion, scale is an essential and critical difference between the Axiom and Sage wiki web sites and wikipedia. Our experience on the Axiom wiki suggests that the ratio of the number of active contributors to the number of people to the total number of visitors our site is as high as 1 in 10,000 - even including "mischievous edits". We do have 2 or 3 people who regularly contribute. The number of visits per month is nearly 10,000 the number of edits. I think the whole reason for wikipedia's success is still quite uncertain. But if wikipedia hosts say 1 million visits per month, then this same ratio is approximately preserved. On Wednesday, September 06, 2006 4:07 PM David Harvey wrote: > Yes, wikipedia is wonderful. But there's a big difference > between prose and code..... a large piece of code can be > completely broken by the tiniest change. Code is much more > unstable than plain text in this sense. I strongly disagree with this view. I don't think one can usefully define "broken" and "stable" in this way. I would claim instead that the "stability" and/or robustness of both code and documentation is largely determined by two factors: 1) how accessible and visible they are, and 2) the extent to which authors and editors (and programmers) take responsibility for and identify with the content > I don't know how much time you guys have spent around wikipedia. > I hung around there a lot last year, and I saw a lot of crazy > people make a lot of crazy edits. On wikipedia, it makes not > a shred of difference if someone changes all the Catalan numbers > to Dogalan numbers (yes, that actually happened). But I would > be really pissed off if someone decided that it would be cool > to see how SAGE would work if i^2 was +1 instead of -1. > ... Certainly one thing that is remarkable about wikipedia is the response of wikipedia and it's contributors to instances of "mischievous edits" (or worse). The integrity of the encyclopedia is apparently being aggressively and effectively defended by people who do not expect anything other than a small amount of recognition for their contributions. The sense of "ownership" is evident in how most people describe wikipedia. One might even be inclined to suspect that "mischievous edits", when not allowed to overrun the really interesting and reliable content actually contributes to this sense of ownership. Wouldn't it be great if we were able to harness some of this human energy for the improvement of computer algebra systems! > > >> If there's a level of protection as William described, i.e. > >> changes need human review before getting sent to the master > >> repository, then I have absolutely no objection, and I think > >> it's a very interesting idea. > > > > There should definitely be a couple of layers of protection. > > Ultimately, my plan was to let the wiki essentially manage a > > darcs repository -- that was how I was planning to let a user > > pull patches down from the wiki. William could still manage > > the official releases. > This would be easy to accomplish and has been discussed on the axiom-developer list, but not yet implemented. The simple reason is that it does not seem urgent since almost no one has come forward wishing to contribute to Axiom in this way. (The sole exception being online editing of the Axiom Tutorial book.) > I've heard of something like this before, but in the other > direction. I heard about someone trying to use svn as a backend > to manage the data for a wiki. Can't remember where I saw this > though... probably on one of the wikipedia tech mailing lists. Yes, this has been done for example as an extension of the Zope application layer on which the ZWiki engine using on the Axiom website is based. > > I'm a bit puzzled by this though... "let the wiki essentially > manage a darcs repository". Does this mean you would need a > nice programmer's text editor in a web page? I haven't seen such > a thing before. > Yes, this is provided on the Axiom wiki via an "external editor" function. After appropriately configuring their browsers, users can click on an edit icon to cause the browser to launch an editor on the user's workstation (such as emacs or some other) with the contents of the wiki page. When the user issues a editor command to save, the page is automatically uploaded to the wiki. See: http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/ExternalEdit In spite of the doubts that are raised in my mind by what I consider to be only the limited success of the Axiom wiki website when it comes to this approach over the last year, I am still optimistic that with a sufficient number of motivated people and with increasing experience of users with this type of system, we might still be able to take advantage this technology. I am glad that it is being considered and developed for Sage. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
