> Caitlin wrote: You should visit Wiki Index -
http://www.wikiindex.org/index.php?title=Welcome
> ... see what every one in the Wiki world is
> working on and add your own wiki to the list.
Thanks Caitlin! It seems that you all don't have your own Wiki at
http://gislounge.com/ yet, right? Are you working on one?
Part of my inquiry is not just to see developmental Wikis all over, but
to see what each person who contributes here is working on. Sadly, my
US TMEP Wiki is on a USB flash drive at the moment, so you all can't see
it and play. Perhaps I could send it to 'round to you all with a Flat
Stanley! ;-) http://www.flatstanley.com/how.html
- Peter Blaise
> Jim wrote: ...[snip]... one guy, only one guy,
> really knows the system ... what if he leaves?
> They demand documentation ... Some poor
> soul is put in change of the system ... tries to
> understand the system but without docs there
> is little he can do ...
Ditto! =8^o Thank you for putting in so many words!
- Peter Blaise
> From: Michael Daly <mikedaly(a)magma.ca>
>
> ... in the real world, management is never going to fund the
> documentation effort and the backup staff.
I've always practiced "guerrilla documentation" -- documenting as I
go, without telling management.
But when *I am* the management, I often don't do this, for the same
reasons real managers don't do it.
:::: If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the
struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and
desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future
will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. - Martin Luther King Jr.
:::: Jan Steinman <http://www.Bytesmiths.com/Item/99-0590-18>
> Gary wrote: Look at a random Wikipedia article
> to see categories 'in action ... I would hazard a
> guess that the reason Wikipedia's search didn't
> find anything was because you did not elect to
> include the Wikipedia: namespace in the search...
Peter Blaise responds: Thanks, Gary, I'm not sure what you mean,
though. "... include the Wikipedia: namespace in the search..." by
doing what? I searched inside MediaWiki/WikiMedia/Wikipedia and found
nothing inside them. They brought up a screen showing Google and Yahoo
searches as alternatives since the found nothing. I then clicked on
Google. With the exact same search, Google found many
MediaWiki/WikiMedia/Wikipedia articles. I was then back in
MediaWiki/WikiMedia/Wikipedia from there. I see why Fred suggested
Google as a better MediaWiki/WikiMedia/Wikipedia search master, perhaps
more so than MediaWiki/WikiMedia/Wikipedia searching within itself. I'm
getting the feeling that MediaWiki is w-a-y less mature or sophisticated
than it's notoriety and popularity suggests.
> Gary wrote: Please don't SHOUT, it only gets
> people's backs up...
Peter Blaise responds: Oh. Sorry. I thought shouting was thought of as
all caps in the entire message, not just occasional emphasis. I re-read
my post and out of my 728 words (thank you MS Word for counting for me)
all I capitalized were the words: nowhere, totally unrelated, within,
and with - about a 0.007% "shouting". But, if you picked up even those
few words as shouting, then even my 5 all-caps words out of my 728 total
words is too much. I'll refrain, thanks for the sensitivity training.
Seriously.
> Gary wrote: ... We're all, aside from a
> select few, volunteers, and don't have to help
> you at all. The text found when you type
> Special:Version into the search box and click
> go says "MediaWiki is distributed in the hope
> that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
> WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty
> of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
> PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General
> Public License for more details."
Peter Blaise responds: Oh, I get it, Gary, you're showing me how
obnoxious you find it when even MediaWiki SHOUTS (oops!). Got it. I
think. Who are the select few here who are not volunteers, who have to
help me, presumably for pay? Seriously. I've got questions for them
(or anyone):
How do you create an admin or sysops after the Wiki's built?
... and, I've got w-a-y more MediaWiki questions at
peter.monahon(a)uspto.gov Thank you.
- Peter Blaise
folks,
My organization makes heavy use of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and the wiki is not finding them with the search tool.
how do I change the search tool behavior so that it find these cryptic codes?
thanks!
Hi there,
I'm looking for an email notification solution for page updates. I'm
aware of the included enotif, but it is unsuitable for our needs for
various reasons:
- I don't care about the changes since I've last visited the page, I
want to see all incremental changes from version to version.
- I want notifications to be continuous, not one-off until I next visit
the page.
- I'd like a raw wikitext diff of the most recent change included in
each email.
In short, I'm looking for something that is closer to commit messages
when using revision systems like SVN or CVS.
Since unfortunately the time I can spend on this is limited, I'd like to
ask whether anyone has hacked up similar functionality?
Cheers,
Christian.
--
________________________________________________________________________
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~cpk25http://www.whoop.org
The solution is at hand, go to
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
and pitch in.
Fred
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Daly [mailto:mikedaly@magma.ca]
>Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 11:07 AM
>To: 'MediaWiki announcements and site admin list'
>Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?
>
>Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] wrote:
>
>> As the system gets used more and
>> then becomes a critical piece of infrastructure, management gets
>> worried, what of he leaves? They demand documentation, the programmer
>> laughs. "Its self documented!".
>
>Anyone who's worked in the IT business for more than a few years has
>likely seen this. Management is at fault for not making documentation
>mandatory and for allowing themselves to be so dependent on one
>programmer to this degree.
>
>However, in the real world, management is never going to fund the
>documentation effort and the backup staff. They are not going to take a
>project that is inevitably late and over budget and spring for the extra
>time & $$$ to get the documentation done.
>
>> Documentation MUST be part of any system that is to be used by anyone
>> other than the developer. It must be readable and complete.
>
>I agree. I fought that battle for decades. However, it just doesn't
>happen in a world run by petty spreadsheet pushers disguised as senior
>management. It's less likely to be done in a world of volunteer effort
>where coding produces instant gratification and documentation is a drudge.
>
>Nerds as a group have poorer communication skills than the general
>population. You're fighting an uphill battle just to get them to learn
>how to write proper English. I looked at some of the Apache code
>recently, trying to understand how some undocumented feature worked.
>The code was filled with variable names like: r, s, t... "Self
>documented"? Yeah, right. They can't write, they can't type and they
>can't spell. Hence, they produce write-once code that no one else will
>understand without considerable effort.
>
>One of the most abominable code standards that results in unreadable
>code is the product of one Charles Simonyi (formerly of Microsoft). His
>coding standards in MS software are crap. He is currently a paying
>passenger on the Space Station. You don't get paid for real quality in
>the computer business. But some get paid billions.
>
>Mike
>
>_______________________________________________
>MediaWiki-l mailing list
>MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Monahon, Peter B. [mailto:Peter.Monahon@USPTO.GOV]
>Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 08:41 AM
>To: mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>Subject: [Mediawiki-l] What Wiki are we each working on?
>
Our Wiki is a documentation system/knowledge database for the corporate it and slowly evolving into a full-fledged QA-system as well as a tool to manage projects distributed among several locations.
Since we`re very 'near-government' and working in the 'public healthcare' sector, it`s a closed one.
Current setup is:
* MediaWiki: Version 1.9
* Dynamic Pagelists 2
* Pdf-Export using htmldoc 1.9
* Category Tree
* Page Security for MW 1.9
* SectionTransclusion
* WikiFolder (custom ext to include directories from servers.)
Current experiments:
* getting pybot to work (grumpf...)
* htdig as second search engine for wiki and wikifolder based content
(especially phoneme/fuzzy/wildcard search)
* WysiWyg
Reasons to choose MW:
* Whiteboard character
* very good category and template system (oh, and nice skins, too :)
* extremely stable
* intuitive markup (for those getting used to it :)
* quite easely extendable (foreign/own exts)
* 'you know wikipedia? - well, we use the same software' :):)
best regards,
dwe
> "Fred wrote: There are few things regarding
> any open source software that can't be figured
> out by using some creative googling. Fred
Great speculation, Fred. Yes, we Googled and found a *book* (no web
sites) that at least one person on this list has used and found to be
supportive of the types of inquiries and problems I shared:
http://www.packtpub.com/MediaWiki/book
"MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide"
by Mizanur Rahman.
I'll let you all know how it works for me. Thank you, Chad and Dave!
Aside: Dave, "How can anyone be expected to run a catalog with 79 (!!!)
different baseball cap styles?"
to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle - see
http://sanmar.com/sanmar-servlets/CatalogBrowser?v=new&id=126
However, regarding the specific MediaWiki struggles I shared, I've found
no satisfactory Google responses yet. I said so in my first post, but
the admin quashed it. Too long? Some other discomfort? Who knows why
my first post was rejected by the list-serve admin. So, instead, I
re-wrote a shorter inquiry. Now, we can endlessly guess at what details
I originally offered to share up front in this thread. Any other
guesses from others?
Angela, Thank you very much for offering your experience and insight,
details in response to the 4 samples of the type of challenges I'm
experiences. However, I either cannot even get to the screens you
describe as working for you, or I cannot produce the results you imply
should be available or that I want to accomplish. I appreciate your
trying, but short of on-site troubleshooting, I don't think either of us
knows exactly where our attempt to coordinate goes awry.
Here's an example of my frustration finding MediaWiki documentation:
What are "Categories" and why?
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories is meaningless to me since
it does not explain what [Category] is used for, how it works, what are
it's features and benefits. It's like teaching someone how to drive a
car and explaining the steering wheel like this: "turn the steering
wheel by rotating clockwise or anticlockwise". Hello, isn't there
something missing in that? Such as: it's attached to a rolling car and
you actually want to move forward or backward AND change general
direction to get to a destination, probably on roads of some kind? So,
I'd like to know what I can do with Category schemes. Can I easily
design a Category scheme later in life and apply it with a macro,
globally? Or, do I have to manually categorize each page? Can I
categorize by selecting from a schematic clickable menu I build on my
site?
NOWHERE on that page (above) is there a link to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory and I would not have found
more had I not exited from MediaWiki/WikiMedia altogether and wandered
around Google a bit. But, Fred, please note that the two Category
articles I found here are TOTALLY UNRELATED to each other and absolutely
no help in intelligently planning and building and maintaining and
rebuilding a MediaWiki implementation using Categories.
So, I search WITHIN Wikipedia for [how to use wiki categories] and it
barfs up nothing, suggesting that I jump ship into Google or Yahoo
search. I graciously accept Google and find ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization (which Wikipedia
couldn't find on it's own?) which also leads me to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization_FAQ !
I answer my own question:
"No."
Remember the question?
"Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?"
So, I'm printing my own, including further reading on Categories at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy ... this has l-o-n-g day written
all over it!
I'll read the book mentioned above and continue to print and read
hundreds of web reference pages daily, and continue to develop, develop,
develop. My US TMEP Wiki Project is up to ~569,072 words, ~4,593
[Edit]able headings, and it all fits on a 125mb USB flash drive WITH
Apache, MySQL, PHP and more using WOS for development (WOS from
Cornelius Herzog at http://www.chsoftware.net/en, thank you very much)!
- Peter Blaise
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Monahon, Peter B. [mailto:Peter.Monahon@USPTO.GOV]
>Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 08:41 AM
>To: mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>Subject: [Mediawiki-l] What Wiki are we each working on?
>
>.
>May I suggest that we share what Wiki we each are working on? Include a
>link if your Wiki is public, and include a description, especially if
>your Wiki is private. I'll go first:
>
>Peter Blaise's Wiki: Our (US Trademark Office) challenge is how to
>publish laws and rules (which are now in HTML, PDF, and DOC on the web),
>AND seek community critiques and suggestions that are shared with each
>other in full view (Wiki, right?), BUT leave the "statute as it is now"
>intact as an uneditable master reference above all suggested
>replacements. We want more than discussions on the separate
>"discussion" page. We want people to actually rewrite the laws and
>rules as they would prefer it, and then edit each other's preference on
>how they want the statute to read, word for word. Supporting
>discussions are important and informative, but we've noted that
>word-for-word replacement suggestions quickly get lost in discussion
>pages. We want the community-suggested exact replacements, even a
>series of alternative exact replacements - version B, version C, and so
>on - right there on the article page below the current statute in force.
>
>
>I think this idea has great potential for opening up the law world wide,
>but off-the-shelf MediaWiki is a tad immature. Wish me luck. Ideas?
>
>So, what's everyone else working on? Can we see?
>
>- Peter Blaise
What a wonderful project. First thoughts: doc and pdf texts are a real pain in the ass, converting them to a plain text version that is usable is extremely valuable. You will want to "protect" the text of the existing statutes and regulations with a link at the top to editable pages where the community's work can go on. I would suggest several of these to allow allow development of coherent alternatives. On the editable pages place the current text at the top with a direction to not change it. Should it be changed, anyone can go to your protected page, get the source and restore the text. The edit history of the article will show any changes to the original text. As you suggest, you could also use protected sections, should an extension exist and be usable.
I had no idea you were doing such an admirable and useful project. I'll do everything I can to get you up and running, although I'm a newbie myself. Now that you've "come out", perhaps some the real experts will also offer substantial help.
I initiated and do the software on Wikinfo, a fork of Wikipedia: http://wikinfo.org Wikinfo offers alternatives for editors who feel constricted by Wikipedia conventions.
We had a good programmer, but he kept forking the software (and throwing his weight around). I finally gave up on him and went back to the standard version, but am having quite a bit of trouble, as I am being forced to learn way too much.
Fred