[ILUG] Re: wiki software

[Rory Browne]

Quoting Niall Walsh
> I don't think Wiki's are for everything, but they can be very useful.
> They also take monitoring (though it seems we have some volunteers).  I
> think we should probably be thinking of having a static site (which has
> a wiki duplicate which can be pulled across periodically) and a wiki.

There is a time and place for everything. The time for a static site
is when you have an active webteam, and plenty of content that isn't
time dependent. The place for a static is where you want to retain a
tight grip of what the contents of the website are / will be.

The time for a moderated(or membership/account required) wiki is where
you have many committed members, and you need an easy way to keep
track of all of them, and what changes they make, as well a need to
keep an accountability audit, for when people misbehave.

The time for a non-moderated(with no a/c reqd) wiki is when you have a
small amount of content, which means that (a) there is insignificant
work in keeping the pages relitively clean, and (b) you want to
encourage people to submit content without their having to jump
through hoops, cut through red tape, or register accounts.

We have no content, let alone time-independent content. We have about
ten volunteers(by the looks of things), to keep track of, er... ten
people, and we need to encourage more. This is the time for a free(as
in freedom) non-moderated wiki. Perhaps as people and content
accumulated, if people started defacing the wiki, we could switch to
an account based system, as the need presented itself. We should not
start off assuming that people are going to abuse the system, nor
should we start off by assuming that people will submit content to our
wiki no matter how difficult it is.

Perhaps tomorrow will be the time for a moderated wiki, or static
site. Perhaps tomorrow, we'll have a problem with the submission of
inapproperate content. Perhaps tomorrow we'll have to make the site
static. Today we need a non-moderated dynamic site that makes it easy
for submitters from a variety of backgrounds, and a variety of
technical competancies, to add to our site.

I know that this makes it possible for spammers, and crap-artists to
put shite on the site, but I think we should have a little faith, and
leave Murphys law to one side for a while.


> The wiki is for contributing, the static site should hold all the core
> information in a well presented, consistent manner (e.g. edited), and
> segregated for the targets (i.e. useful material for sys admins
> shouldn't be stumbled upon by a random Fooish teacher/student).   The
> wiki may go into further details, and the static site may simply link in
> places across for these details, but the key is to have a polished front
> no matter what work is going on.
> 
> >i'll make the weekend of the 28th/29th of may available and i'll set up
> >twiki or mediawiki on the box (whichever you prefer).
> >
> It may be easier to start with the wiki on another machine initially
> with simply the static site on linux.ie?
> 
> >  and maybe we
> >could do some kind of irc virtual meeting amongst all the people who
> >want to work on it?  perhaps #scoil on irc.linux.ie?
> >
> >
> Sounds like a good idea to me!   Let's see who's out there, what they
> have in mind and get things moving.
> 
> >kevin
> >
> >
> Niall Walsh
> 
> p.s. excuse the late return to the thread, just catching up from a weeks
> holiday :-)
> --
> Irish Linux Users' Group
> http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/
> 
>