Hi Kim,
On Friday 07 July 2006 10:08, Kim Bruning wrote:
On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 03:38:53PM -0400, Eric R. Meyers wrote:
I don't know if Shlomi or Jacinta have read my very enthusiastic response to Shlomi's post on the perl.advocacy usenet, but I've begun to research my idea on Wikipedia, towards the creation of Perl-Wikipedia, "The Free Encyclopedia of Perl."
open WIKI, "perl" or die "for great justice"; # :-)
Absolutely! :)
Hello Eric, I understand you'd like to set up a centralised wiki for all perl programmers.
Wikimedia foundation has some very broad, general purpose wikis, and it's probably not what you want.
However, the foundation does also release their mediawiki software under GPL. Setting up your own server is probably your best bet, and it's not hard!
Obviously, I'm not a wiki expert. I'm simply a Systems Engineer and Perl Programming Language advocate, who frequently uses Wikipedia to learn, and I really like what Wikimedia has been doing over the last few years, so I'm also a Wikimedia advocate. I really liked Shlomi's great idea, and Shlomi is a wiki expert from Israel, and he has researched and/or used a variety of wiki server programs. Jacinta is a wiki expert from Australia, and she said that http://perl.net.au uses MediaWiki for their wiki named "PerlNet — The Perl portal for Australia and New Zealand." I simply said that I'd like to help them to set this good thing up, and I'm trying to figure out "The Right Way" to do it.
The program Mediawiki (our wiki server software) has options to trivially make inter-wiki links, so you can tie your wiki to any other particular existing wiki quite easily. You might also like to make use of the patches being developed by the literate programming wiki folks mentioned elsewhere in this thread. These will even allow the server to validate perl code that's on your wiki.
Finally, if you have funds or time that the literate programming people don't, you could work with them to provide virtual machines for sandboxes (either server-side or if you're totally crazy you could even try for client-side). This would allow you to even safely run perl code straight off the wiki!
My first answer to you is Yes, I'm "totally crazy." :) I'm not doing too good with personal funds anymore, but that personal time thing is fairly easy for me now. For the past few years, while Wikimedia has been doing all of their very interesting, technical and world-changing work, I've been fully disabled and recovering from a very serious illness, an unidentified CNS disorder that has left me physically disabled, but I'm extremely lucky that my mental capabilities are being returned to me, and I still get to be Dad for two beautiful girls. I believe that God has kept me here for some of His own good reasons. I used to integrate Submarine and Surface Ship combat systems, which is not a bad thing to do in this world, but now I'm focused on writing programs to protect children from visual attacks on the internet, and some other things, like helping people out at the perl.beginners usenet.
These other interesting things that you've mentioned, previously unknown to me, are the types of things that I'm trying to discover, learn and understand through this discussion. Thanks much. I really like that word "trivially," because those "inter-wiki links" are my real practical concern. I want to achieve very tight content-coupling with all of Wikimedia's excellent content to eliminate redundancies, ambiguities and errors, and to make it very apparent that the Perl community is contributing the Perl-particular content under the greater Wikimedia-general content, and "The Perl Wiki" is simply to do "The Right Thing" by adding its underlying content for "The Bigger Picture" being presented by The Wikimedia Foundation's "very broad and general purpose wikis." The more general things should go up into the greater wiki nodes, and the more particular things should go down into the lesser wiki nodes. There'll be no redundancy, if we can achieve this tight content-coupling through those trivially implemented "inter-wiki links." And at the point of successfully achieving some very good, free & open content, functionality and availability, who particularly cares what something is called underneath, where it's hosted or who owns the name of a particular wiki at the moment. If it all somehow synergizes, then we don't need to fix it, but until we have this functional shuffle toward a convergence that I believe can be brought to fruition, I'll look around to find out how to fix it "The Right Way" for "The Perl Wiki" to consolidate the Perl wikis that are out there right now.
In short, wikimedia foundation adheres to the unix philosophy in that it's good at one (small set of) thing(s), and doing it/them well.
To do something else (like make a wiki specific to perl) , you might want to set it up yourself. As a bonus, you can customize the heck out of it while you're at it.
I'm not a big enough crazy to try to do something like this all by myself. I don't want to do it for me, but for us. I'm just advocating Shlomi's good idea, and acting upon my personal commitment to help get it started, by researching and having some good discussions with nice people like you, and the others whom I've met here.
Of course, a number of volunteers will be very very interested in what you're doing, so you'd likely get plenty of help. There's also a channel on irc.freenode.net : #mediawiki, where you can get help with the software.
I originally went to the #wikipedia-bootcamp channel, etc., before joining Foundation-l to start this discussion.
Finally: There's only one small disadvantage to this entire plan (from a perl perspective): Mediawiki is written in PHP ;-)
I did some PHP-CGI scripting for my WWW::YouTube distribution that I published in the CPAN, but most importantly I want to keep things simple for the long term by closely following Wikimedia's pattern. I think that Wikimedia is on "The Right Path."
Angela Beesley sent me a very nice email yesterday, from Wikia, to tell me that she has set up http://perl.wikia.com and the perl-l@wikia.com mailing list. I haven't gotten a chance to do much about it yet, but I'm fairly satisfied that some good progress is being made.
Thanks again,
Eric