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"; # :-)
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!
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!
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.
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.
Finally: There's only one small disadvantage to this entire plan (from a perl perspective): Mediawiki is written in PHP ;-)
read you soon, Kim Bruning