Starting the thread at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-user&m=100255929813056&w=2 , I felt reluctant bringing up again the usual sensitive points in an open source, or more generally, in a volunteering project.
Please let me reiterate some thoughts: - I did not want to CRITICISE the people working on the project, because no one ever has the right to criticise VOLUNTEERS who are DONATING time and effort - however volunteers need FEEDBACK - I did want to give some feedback on the experience a midgard newbie goes through, being frustrated with the way information is available now: in order to be able to install the thing, you practically have to have read through hundreds of mails for months to collect the pieces of information that make up the difference with the previous version I was asking in my mail to add the annotation possibility again to the online manual. I also think the faq is a very good thing, thanks for all that! But I still think that it will remain difficult to keep up with the information flow in the mailing list. The problem with the mailing list is that is far too unstructured to extract information from it afterwards, afterwards meaning: if you do not follow it daily. (And if you DO follow it daily, you simply do not have time left to AND work on the documentation AND proceed with midgard development...). Furthermore, it turns out that very few people keep being motivated for this editorial work, eternally having to catch up with the far more exciting development... So I' m afraid that we 'll have to find other means to avoid users asking the same questions over and over again and developers having to spend too much time on support. One such a thing I stumbled into (while doing some reading on Xtreme Programming: http://wiki.xp.be/) is a WikiWikiWeb, or simply Wiki. Wiki is dead simple (hence its success) and is a "collaborative web", something between a faq, a plain website, and a discussion list. You can find the mother of all Wikis at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki. It allows you to edit the contents of a web IN PLACE, so that you do not have to search for the original mail to find back what exactly the original question or argument was. It allows you to DELETE unnecessary or outdated content, so you don't have to weed through it anymore. It is a very fast way to create interlinked pages using BumpyWords that are turned into links immediately (you can use [words between brackets] as an alternative). People can cooperate on a structured, navigable and changing collection of pages, that can be used both as a faq, a discussion list, or an (ever changing) online manual. The advantage for us is that answering a question and making that answer available for reference afterwards is ONE effort, there is no need for a poor soul doing copy-and paste work in a faq, that is, if the Wiki is used with discipline. The Wiki may not be able to take away completely the need for a well-structured manual in xml (that can be published to both html and to paper) but it should reduce the effort to make it, because a lot of the text content should already have grown organically. You can find more on Wiki's on http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NewUserPages and I cannot help but quoting from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWebFaq : ________________________________________________ Q: So, bottom-line it for me. What the hell is all this Wiki crap useful for anyways? I'm interested in using Wiki technology to help organize a software project... but would using Wiki be better than, say, a plain vanilla message board? I've already decided it's better than a chat room, since the text is more permanent. posted by [EMAIL PROTECTED] November 2, 2000 A: ... Compared to a plain vanilla message board, a Wiki's advantage is in DocumentMode. In a message board, somebody writes, somebody answers, somebody else answers, somebody asks a follow up question, ..... You end up with a whole lot of messages but not an integrated story. On a wiki, somebody can start a wiki page by asking a question. Someone can come along and edit that page to answer the question. Somebody else can come along and edit the answer to cover an additional point, or clarify a point, or whatever. If somebody edits the page by adding a followup question, it can be left on that page and then answered. Maybe it makes more sense to move it to its own page. Somebody looking for an answer does not have to read through a long series of messages to see all the nuances of the answer, they just read the Wiki page where all of those nuances have been continually edited into an integrated whole. Now, sometimes people will treat the wiki page much like a message board -- somebody will post a question, somebody will add the answer below it, somebody will clarify the answer by adding a note below that. This is called ThreadMode. It is OK, and sometimes it is a necessary step in the evolution of a document mode answer, but document mode is better. If you are lucky, someone will come along and take it upon themself to edit (refactor?) the threaded page into an integrated document mode page. ________________________________________________ Now I hope I got you at least curious enough to check out a trial wiki I put on http://wwwdev.itforum.be/phpwiki/ (I' m using bandwidth of a Midgard site under construction at Envida's of my - consenting - employer). I'm using phpWiki (http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net), an implementation of the ideas of the original Perl Wiki at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki. A problem with the current version of phpWiki is that it does not support simple authentication yet (not in order to be able to restrict people, but to make changes better traceable). There are also some administration issues, such as the difficulty renaming pages, and finding unlinked pages. In order to use it the same way as a discussion list, you simply go to http://wwwdev.itforum.be/phpwiki/index.php?RecentChanges, a bit the same way you read a discussion list using web mail. The possibility to email links to recently changed pages on a regular basis, is not yet foreseen unfortunately. An alternative is the perl-based http://twiki.org/. Twiki has e-mail notification, and a better user and page management. , but I did not choose to install this one because of lack of experience with perl. Furthermore, what's possible in perl should be possible in php as well, and if we use a php wiki, snippetizing it for midgard could be a next step :-). Other alternatives are discussed on http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WikiWikiClones . As far as I could see, http://sfwiki.sourceforge.net/ was not stable and lacking developers. If you have more information on possible Wiki implementations to use, please share them on http://wwwdev.itforum.be/phpwiki/index.php?PhpWikiVersusOtherWikiImplementations ... I really feel we should give it a try and abandon the mailinglist for a Wiki. The people on the mailinglist are practically all techies who should not have difficulties mastering this new medium, but I think the problem we have now is that I'm not sure this PhpWiki 1.2 is the right solution at this moment. So I'm anxiously waiting for your feedback, Regards, pascal van hecke __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals. http://personals.yahoo.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
