On 11/5/05, Bret Pettichord <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 03:46 PM 11/4/2005, Sy Ali wrote: > >I'd still rather like to update the entire wiki by > >migrating it to mediawiki. It was rather annoying to have had to wade > >through that FAQ the few times that I did in order to clean it up > >somewhat (and also answer my own questions). > > Thanks for cleaning it up. It looks a lot bettter. > > We are always open to specific proposals. Why would media wiki be better? > Where would it be hosted?
My main issue with the existing wiki is their markup language. The insistance of "CamelCase" links forces broken english titles and poor sentances and is an eyesore to edit. The main benefits of mediawiki would be the various different skins. I'm a particular fan of the default skin. It's quite beautiful. This is the first and foremost thing that everyday users would see. The second would be the much nicer organization of the information. From experience, I can say that it's been intuitive to organize and maintain a lot of information within a mediawiki installation. On the inside, the editing is very easy (the markup language is good). It's extremely nice to be able to edit just a section of a page.. one doesn't get lost on more complecated pages like a FAQ. Automatic table of contents is nice. The templating engine allows for easy re-use of snippets of information. Adding inline images is trivial. For more technical reasons, mediawiki is very easy to update and maintain. Updating it amounts to unpacking the new tarball over the previous directory and running "php update.php" (or without ssh access, it's still quite easy). It's extremely easy to supervise, with controls for viewing recent changes and the lke. For more social reasons, MediaWiki is wildly popular and in my mind proved as an excellent tool because of its use for the Wikipedia. This is what would assure continued development.. there are a lot of interested people. My only warnings are to require usernames for editing, to use the spamblacklist extension and to include a one-liner regex to ban certain types of content. I can provide help with these things. If hosting is an issue, I'd be pleased to host it with my resources.. but it'll go anywhere php/mysql does. Curiously, it looks like the markup language is almost the same from the existing wiki to mediawiki. This means that it would be nearly trivial to hand-port the content from the existing wiki to a mediawiki installation. Yes, I would be willing to do this and unless you've got hundreds of pages of content I could get it done within two weeks. This would include the original wiki's content as well. My own wiki: http://jrandomhacker.info http://jrandomhacker.info/MediaWiki I also help maintain two other wikis: My local Linux user group (GTALUG): http://gtalug.org My local Ruby user group (TRUG): http://trug.stok.co.uk/wiki/ soon to be http://trug.ca I've set up MediaWiki for my old work and my current business. This is after a long and tiring history with a few other wikis. MediaWiki has been amazing. In the meantime, I intend to open up a Watir-specific section in TRUG since I've just begun working with watir and need to begin a resource and code repository. Sorry for being long-winded.. but I just got back from our meeting and am revved up. =) Sy, _______________________________________________ Wtr-general mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
