Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
2009/4/6 Ed Murphy emurph...@socal.rr.com: For entering things, sure, but for being able to analyze purported errors and correct them if needed? Not everyone has their own VCS. (git|darcs|hg) is hard, let's go shopping.
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 16:15 +0100, Elliott Hird wrote: 2009/4/6 Ed Murphy emurph...@socal.rr.com: For entering things, sure, but for being able to analyze purported errors and correct them if needed? Not everyone has their own VCS. (git|darcs|hg) is hard, let's go shopping. During my previous stint at Notary, I kept a darcs repository of all the changes to the report. (Not to mention, of course, the intrinsic change history that comes from posting all reports to email.) -- ais523
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
ais523 wrote: On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 16:15 +0100, Elliott Hird wrote: 2009/4/6 Ed Murphy emurph...@socal.rr.com: For entering things, sure, but for being able to analyze purported errors and correct them if needed? Not everyone has their own VCS. (git|darcs|hg) is hard, let's go shopping. During my previous stint at Notary, I kept a darcs repository of all the changes to the report. (Not to mention, of course, the intrinsic change history that comes from posting all reports to email.) The main advantage I see with a wiki is that it's easy for anyone else to review the change history (I'm sure you could make this possible with $FAVORITE_VCS as well, but probably not as easy). I agree that it doesn't make much difference to the Notary if e's equally familiar with both toolsets.
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
2009/4/6 Ed Murphy emurph...@socal.rr.com: The main advantage I see with a wiki is that it's easy for anyone else to review the change history (I'm sure you could make this possible with $FAVORITE_VCS as well, but probably not as easy). I agree that it doesn't make much difference to the Notary if e's equally familiar with both toolsets. $ git instaweb or $ hg serve vs going through wikidot's signup process
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
ehird wrote: 2009/4/6 Ed Murphy emurph...@socal.rr.com: The main advantage I see with a wiki is that it's easy for anyone else to review the change history (I'm sure you could make this possible with $FAVORITE_VCS as well, but probably not as easy). Â I agree that it doesn't make much difference to the Notary if e's equally familiar with both toolsets. $ git instaweb or $ hg serve vs going through wikidot's signup process A wiki is just a VCS with a GUI front-end. Discuss.
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 20:41 +0100, Elliott Hird wrote: 2009/4/6 Ed Murphy emurph...@socal.rr.com: A wiki is just a VCS with a GUI front-end. Discuss. Wikidot is just a bad VCS (does it even handle non-linear edits? I doubt it.) operating on a bad document format with an awful interface that requires javascript and that has no way to get non-HTML out of it; even scraping is prohibited by its TOS, and as a result it's decreasing the quality of our reports for no gain -- in fact, anti-gain, since the Notary has to use it. Discuss. Not to mention that Murphy's solution for actually being able to submit a report at all involves me having to edit one page, and rename and retag an entirely different page, whenever a contract is created or destroyed. And yet I can't come up with anything better... -- ais523 Notary
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
ehird wrote: 2009/4/6 Ed Murphy emurph...@socal.rr.com: A wiki is just a VCS with a GUI front-end. Â Discuss. Wikidot is just a bad VCS (does it even handle non-linear edits? I doubt it.) operating on a bad document format with an awful interface that requires javascript and that has no way to get non-HTML out of it; even scraping is prohibited by its TOS, and as a result it's decreasing the quality of our reports for no gain -- in fact, anti-gain, since the Notary has to use it. Discuss. How often do we need non-linear edits? That said, I'm not defending Wikidot in particular, I just picked it because it served my needs when I was Notary (ease of initial setup). If it gets migrated, please just keep a web interface of some sort.
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Elliott Hird penguinoftheg...@googlemail.com wrote: Wikidot is just a bad VCS (does it even handle non-linear edits? I doubt it.) operating on a bad document format with an awful interface that requires javascript and that has no way to get non-HTML out of it; even scraping is prohibited by its TOS, and as a result it's decreasing the quality of our reports for no gain -- in fact, anti-gain, since the Notary has to use it. Discuss. No one's forcing the Notary to use it. Discuss.
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 15:54 -0400, Geoffrey Spear wrote: On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Elliott Hird penguinoftheg...@googlemail.com wrote: Wikidot is just a bad VCS (does it even handle non-linear edits? I doubt it.) operating on a bad document format with an awful interface that requires javascript and that has no way to get non-HTML out of it; even scraping is prohibited by its TOS, and as a result it's decreasing the quality of our reports for no gain -- in fact, anti-gain, since the Notary has to use it. Discuss. No one's forcing the Notary to use it. Discuss. The data's all there, and we're left with no legal recourse to get it back again as Wikidot don't allow automated scraping; the Notary reports are manual scraping by copy/paste. So migrating back would be rather tricky and time-consuming, although probably possible. -- ais523
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Elliott Hird penguinoftheg...@googlemail.com wrote: Wikidot is just a bad VCS (does it even handle non-linear edits? I doubt it.) Non-linear edits? Are you referring to branching/merging? -root
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 14:10 -0600, Ian Kelly wrote: On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Elliott Hird penguinoftheg...@googlemail.com wrote: Wikidot is just a bad VCS (does it even handle non-linear edits? I doubt it.) Non-linear edits? Are you referring to branching/merging? More to the point, Wikidot doesn't even handle edit conflicts (instead it just locks the page); most wiki software can get those right. -- ais523
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Alex Smith ais...@bham.ac.uk wrote: The data's all there, and we're left with no legal recourse to get it back again as Wikidot don't allow automated scraping; the Notary reports are manual scraping by copy/paste. So migrating back would be rather tricky and time-consuming, although probably possible. Not necessarily. Have we actually tried using the backup feature to download the site as a zip file? How compatible is wikidot syntax with, say, wikia syntax? -root
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Ian Kelly ian.g.ke...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Alex Smith ais...@bham.ac.uk wrote: The data's all there, and we're left with no legal recourse to get it back again as Wikidot don't allow automated scraping; the Notary reports are manual scraping by copy/paste. So migrating back would be rather tricky and time-consuming, although probably possible. Not necessarily. Have we actually tried using the backup feature to download the site as a zip file? How compatible is wikidot syntax with, say, wikia syntax? Also, what about this: http://www.wikidot.com/doc:api -root
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 14:27 -0600, Ian Kelly wrote: On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Alex Smith ais...@bham.ac.uk wrote: The data's all there, and we're left with no legal recourse to get it back again as Wikidot don't allow automated scraping; the Notary reports are manual scraping by copy/paste. So migrating back would be rather tricky and time-consuming, although probably possible. Not necessarily. Have we actually tried using the backup feature to download the site as a zip file? How compatible is wikidot syntax with, say, wikia syntax? I asked Murphy about the possibility of using the backup feature to scrape the site, and got no response IIRC; maybe e missed the message. The syntax is rather different from MediaWiki's, but a sufficiently small proportion of it is actually used on the notary wiki that automatically converting would be easy enough. -- ais523 Notary
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
ais523 wrote: On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 14:27 -0600, Ian Kelly wrote: On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Alex Smith ais...@bham.ac.uk wrote: The data's all there, and we're left with no legal recourse to get it back again as Wikidot don't allow automated scraping; the Notary reports are manual scraping by copy/paste. So migrating back would be rather tricky and time-consuming, although probably possible. Not necessarily. Have we actually tried using the backup feature to download the site as a zip file? How compatible is wikidot syntax with, say, wikia syntax? I asked Murphy about the possibility of using the backup feature to scrape the site, and got no response IIRC; maybe e missed the message. The syntax is rather different from MediaWiki's, but a sufficiently small proportion of it is actually used on the notary wiki that automatically converting would be easy enough. For a one-time migration, you could just manually edit each page, copy+paste the source into a local text editor, then cancel the edit and move on to the next. It's only a few dozen pages, and http://agora-notary.wikidot.com/system:page-tags/tag/contract should be a complete list of what you need to grab. Then you'd just want to look at the other tags (private, contest, pledge, partnership) and copy+paste those lists somewhere as well.
DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
root wrote: I tried to edit my own page on the Notary wiki a few weeks ago and was unable to. You have to ask Murphy for edit permissions to be able to edit the wiki. (The whole setup seems rather suboptimal to me, as I have to try to reflect everything that happens contract-wise on the wiki, and would have to check anyway, as Notary, to ensure everything is up-to-date. Therefore, the wiki adds no real convenience to me, as people normally don't update it themselves; and even when they want to, they can't due to the restrictive editing policy.) -- ais523 Notary winmail.dat
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
On 2009-04-06, Ed Murphy emurph...@socal.rr.com wrote: ais523 wrote: root wrote: I tried to edit my own page on the Notary wiki a few weeks ago and was unable to. You have to ask Murphy for edit permissions to be able to edit the wiki. (The whole setup seems rather suboptimal to me, as I have to try to reflect everything that happens contract-wise on the wiki, and would have to check anyway, as Notary, to ensure everything is up-to-date. Therefore, the wiki adds no real convenience to me, as people normally don't update it themselves; and even when they want to, they can't due to the restrictive editing policy.) Adds no convenience compared to what baseline? Feel free to move it to another wiki without the scraping restrictions. The baseline of a text file? Meanwhile, I've opened up membership via application, password (rule2173 - you may want to mention this in the Notary report's boilerplate text), or invitation from any current member: http://agora-notary.wikidot.com/system:join http://agora-notary.wikidot.com/system:invite
Re: DIS: RE: Re: OFF: [Notary] Weekly and Monthly Contract Reports
ehird wrote: (The whole setup seems rather suboptimal to me, as I have to try to reflect everything that happens contract-wise on the wiki, and would have to check anyway, as Notary, to ensure everything is up-to-date. Therefore, the wiki adds no real convenience to me, as people normally don't update it themselves; and even when they want to, they can't due to the restrictive editing policy.) Adds no convenience compared to what baseline? Feel free to move it to another wiki without the scraping restrictions. The baseline of a text file? For entering things, sure, but for being able to analyze purported errors and correct them if needed? Not everyone has their own VCS.
