> haskell.org is the obvious place. I'm sure John Peterson would be happy
> to add stuff to the site.
>
> Community-generated FAQ pages sound great, but
>
> - Some (standard? readily-available?) technology is needed to allow
> people to add stuff without intervention from the site organiser.
> The Wiki-Wiki-Web stuff indeed looks like a real possibility. I didn't
> know about it; thanks for the pointer. But someone has
> to set it up and host it. Any volunteers?
The best thing to find it out is to examine the standard
procedures on the best Wiki-Wiki servers, such as Swiki
(Swiki Swiki page is devoted to the technology of Swiki
servers). In addition, we could get in touch with corresponding
system administrators and ask them about their headaches
with maintenance and security issues. I guess - they have some.
I could volunteer for this task providing that we have some
consensus here regarding usefulness of such server, available
network resources and our will to implement it.
As far as I know, the model is based on a complete anarchy
and a trust in good user intentions. Anyone can mess with
existing pages. Some users, not necessarily the system
administrator, would probably backup the stuff periodically
- just in case.
On another hand, the original Wiki-Wiki server has run
for several years. Swiki server has amazing number of
pages - ranging from documentation to collaborative
working platforms for variety of ideas for Squick. It
appears that it works somehow - otherwise their server
would have died several years ago when they started it all.
>
> - Would people actually add stuff? I'm a bit skeptical, but it would
> be great to have my skepticism proved unfounded.
One good example is provided by this thread. It would
be a shame if the results stayed burried here instead
of being exposed to a more public forum. I would
envision having the topic stated, followed by Keith excellent
explanation of his straightforward classical approach,
then by several demonstrations of how it could be done
by 'mean and lean' ways -- as provided by Sven and the
others. With explanation of motivations 'why'.
I would also love to see some links from there to
a general topic of operator compositions, to monads,
to IO, etc.
Some time ago, I witnessed here quite a hot and lengthy
discussion about exceptions in Haskell. Several models
were discussed, some of the stuff was to be implemented in GHC.
But I have not seen any final conclusions or a digest
made. If this was worthy of such a good discussion, then
it would be worthy to have it in FAQ as well.
I am also sure that those who teach would gladly expose
their own little tricks of trade, which are probably publicly
accessible anyway through their course pages.
Since we are not talking here about major scientific
breakthroughs, an individual ego would not horribly suffer
if someone corrected the author in public and found a better
style, solution or explanation. Links to the authors' pages
could also be provided. Swiki, for example, keeps local
references to contributors's resumes. They even go to
such extreme that other members add some kudos to such
pages as well.
Some netiquette policy could be established on how to delete
or modify the existing stuff - without offending original
contributors. But - judging from what I know about this
forum - this should never be a real problem. The idea is
to produce the best possible documents, which must therefore
be the subjects to pruning, modifications and reorganizations.
Jan
