Tom Purl wrote:
I've done a bit of work on the vimtips wiki at Google the last few days,
and it's come to my attention that it isn't really designed to do what
we want it to do. The Google wiki is designed to be used by a small
number of people working on a particular open source project. It is not
designed to be editable by hundreds (or possibly thousands) of users to
exchange tips on using an application.
I guess we need (if possible) something along the lines of "the" wiki,
<language>.wikipedia.org
The basic bottleneck is that only "project members" can edit the wiki,
meaning that these will be the only people who can add or edit tips.
The only way to become a project member is to have a project admin (so
far, me) visit the project's admin interface and add him or her. There
is no web interface or other functionality in place to do this in a more
automated way.
This awkward user-registration process will most certainly keep people
from contributing or updating tips. It will also create a lot of
tedious and error-proned work for the project's admins, even if I were to
add a dozen more.
Or give every member admin privileges, but I suppose that isn't wise either.
IMHO every wiki needs admins even if everyone can get an account and edit any
page.
So as I see it, we have two things we need to do if we want to keep the
wiki conversion project moving:
1. Define our wiki requirements
* Do we want anonymous users to be able to contribute at all like
they can on vim.org/tips today?
* Does the wiki have to be hosted by Google, or is it ok if we move
to another wiki host if they match all of our requirements?
* This question is probably mostly for Bram, since he first
suggested the Google wiki.
* I personally really like Google in general. They just don't
have the apps that we need today.
Google, Schmoogle, I don't care. Ideally an alias DNS record should be set up,
so that wiki.vim.org will bring us to the wiki frontpage, wherever it's
hosted. Or is that impossible due to the way vim.org is entangled with
sourceforge?
* Cost?
* I'm assuming that the ideal number if free :)
* Embedded WYSIWYG editor, etc.
Embedded WYSIWIG editor is a "cherry on the cake": en.wikipedia.org has no
WYSIWIG editing but if we could lay hands on something working that way (and
at that price, i.e., free as in beer), IMHO we shouldn't think twice about it.
For complex editing we have Vim anyway ;-). Some browsers can use it directly
to edit textareas, and for others we can shuttle back and forth via the clipboard.
2. Choose the wiki host that best suits our needs
* I see two options:
* Wait for Google to meet all of our requirements?
* Google recently acquired JotSpot, so maybe that wiki will
be functional enough to meet all of our requirements
some day.
* Find a different wiki host that does meet all of our
requirements, and should be able to do so for at least 3
years or so.
Only three years? For how long have the tips & scripts been hosted by
sourceforge? I imagine that three years from now the project may be barely up
to speed; the longer the better, and I'd say 5 years minimum.
So what do you guys think?
Tom Purl
A last-minute thought: would it be possible to name the project
vim.wikipedia.org or something (and set it up in Wikipedia space)? Hm, I guess
not: there might already be some obscure language with the ISO code "vim"...
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Beware of low-flying butterflies.
