There is a perl wikibook:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl

Hi Jeff,

On Wednesday 05 July 2006 17:02, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:

But be advised that if you import any of the XML dumps from download.wikimedia.org, then you will discover "Wikipedia" littered throughout, including ads for Wikimania, funding solicitation, etc. , so to remove any confusion, convert the word "Wikipedia" into an adjective by terming it a "Wikipedia Mirror" if you are mirroring their content - it its a new wiki not mirroring their content, "Wikipedia" is an restricted trademark.

I didn't come here two steal Wikipedia content, etc., from Wikimedia; instead, I came here to learn, discuss, and find "The Right Way" to do something for the global Perl community that everyone can agree with hopefully. I have no plans to do anything, download anything or mirror anything, I'm only a few days into an idea, and I believe that I came to "The Right Place" to discuss something with the Wikimedia experts, and to find out what can and can't be done.

If I came to "The Wrong Place" to discuss ideas with the Wikimedia experts, then please direct me to "The Right People" to talk to at Wikimedia. I just see a very good parallel for the needs of "The Perl Wiki," as what Wikipedia has been doing for all of the topics under the sun. Perl topics are just a subset of All topics. There is no sense in doing something different and separate for the many varied topics in Perl, when Wikimedia has been coming up with fantastic solutions for encyclopedic information and all topics in general. I don't know what can and can't be done yet, but I do know that Wikimedia is doing "The Right Stuff," so that is why I'm here willing to learn and discuss these integration problems, while personally risking looking like an idiot in public. :)

Eric

On Wednesday 05 July 2006 17:24, geni wrote:

Closest would be the wikibooks thing. Other than that you would be looking to start a completely new project which is unlikely to work too well.

I didn't actually expect negativity towards what I believe will be a good thing. The immediate first impressions have brought reactions about copyright and trademark violations, but I'm not here to steal. I'm here to use and emulate a very good thing. I absolutely agree with you that part of the solution will be a multitude of references to Wikibooks, but another part of it will likely be Wikipedia-like encyclopedic topical references, and the other Wikimedia components, which I will be investigating tonight.

Why would a completely new project be "unlikely to work too well?"

What is it that you are seeing that will limit me to just using Wikibooks?

Thanks,

Eric

On Wednesday 05 July 2006 18:10, geni wrote:

Apoligies you arived in the middle of a seperate discussion that has had some side effects.

No problem, I understand. :)

My point about not coming to copy or steal was that I have no interest in being redundant, rather I want all new information to be extentions of the current knowledge base, well integrated and highly interlinked with what already has been done very well within Wikipedia. I like Wikipedia a lot!

Problems with finding an editorbase. The foundation doesn't have much in the way of a history of doing single issue projects. there appears to be a general bias against them amoung the various wikimedia editor bases since they tend to duplicat the work of either wikipedia or wikibooks.

What do you mean by an editorbase? Do you simply mean people who will be willing experts, authors and editors of content? Perl has a well established community of experts, authors and editors, and if "The Perl Wiki" is built correctly, then they will come to take advantage of a very good thing and extend it into an even better thing for themselves and others to learn from. That has been the perl.advocacy usenet discussion, about building the central reference Wiki, from the various specialized Wiki sites around the world, to create the global wiki for the Perl community. And Wikibooks will be a must have component for the Perl community. Something magic might happen.

I know what you mean about not having a history yet, but that doesn't mean that there can't be a new precedent set here. The people at Wikimedia are doing something new in our information history, you are opening new doors, and I think that I found a door that might possibly get to be opened someday, not just for the Perl community, but for all global communities. The reason that I came to Wikimedia today is because I want to make sure that whatever I want to do conforms to Wikimedia's wishes. The last thing that I want to do is have a negative impact upon what they have been doing so well. Is their a correct structure that will work, for us to work together?

What is an encyclopedia going to become, with Wikpedia setting a new functional standard? How much breadth and how much depth does Wikimedia want in Wikipedia? I don't think that Wikimedia has any real concern for the breadth of topics, but I do want to understand the practical limits on the depth of a particular topic, in this case, the Perl topic. I do want to understand how we might be able to work together correctly to set a new standard.

Setting up a new type of project within the foundation is a slow process. You best bet is probably either to stick with the articles on wikipedia and wikibooks or to start your own project on one of the various free wiki hosts or your own server.

I made reference to what I had learned about the new project policy, saying that I was aware that it could take years to bring an idea to fruition. But, I don't see it as what you think of as a new project, but more of an integration of all the Wikipedia components available to solve a Perl community problem. What can we do together in parallel?

Eric

Hi Erik,

On Wednesday 05 July 2006 18:23, Erik Moeller wrote:

Hello Eric,

as geni has explained, the Wikimedia Foundation tends to launch broad projects over narrow ones: Wikipedia over "an encyclopedia of birds", Wikinews over "a news site about health issues", Wikisource over "public domain novels", and so on.

No problem. I understand Wikimedia's interest of breadth of topics in Wikipedia, over depth of topics, but how do we correctly tie a special-interest encyclopedia, "The Free Encyclopedia of Perl," into the main general-purpose encyclopedia, "The Free Encyclopedia," and also to other possible special-interest encyclopedias. Do you know what I mean, and do now you know where I'm trying to go with this WikiMedia-based hierarchy? I don't want to copy or steal, just emulate and extend. I need to know the best hierarchical structure that will integrate the various special-interest information sources most effectively to avoid redundancy and bring about synergy with the Wikimedia components such as Wikipedia, and now Wikibooks.

Much of the content of an "encyclopedia of Perl" would likely have a place in our existing Wikipedia and Wikibooks projects. For source code, there's also an interesting wiki at: http://en.literateprograms.org/

Thanks, I'll take a look at that site.

So right now, if most of the Perl content would be in Wikibooks, then you'd apparently have no problem with some editing under the Perl topic in Wikipedia to organize and reference those Wikibooks, as long as we didn't go too far into the great depth of the topic of Perl within Wikipedia? We could possibly find "The Right Way" to incrementally cooperate, working together and agreeing which direction that we might go in the future? There will be external references to glue everything together, but as long as it gets glued together, that's okay. We can incrementally figure out "The Right Way" to do things.

I didn't want to slam Wikipedia, by doing too much of the wrong or right things, without Wikimedia having some clue as to what was happening underneath the Perl topic. Okay?

What would be the justification for starting a new separate Wikimedia site just for Perl? Mind you, nothing will stop you from setting up your own site using the MediaWiki software (except maybe an aversion to PHP ;-). You can also use a wiki hosting service, like the ones listed at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science:How_to_start_a_Wiki

My real interest is integrating the depth of Perl knowledge with the breadth of Wikipedia knowledge, creating Perl-Wikipedia, and "The Perl Wiki" will eventually happen. And yes, I do PHP-CGI too, and we're already aware of MediaWiki in the perl.advocacy usenet group, because I know that it's currently being used for the Australian Perl Wiki at http://perl.net.au, which I referenced in my initial submission.

Eric

On Wednesday 05 July 2006 20:51, Erik Moeller wrote:

...

Thank you very much. Like I said, I came to learn from the experts, so I'll study what you given to me. Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Eric

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

Hi Michael,

I'm very glad to hear from you. I actually saved one of your recent emails to foundation-l, Re: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity - feedback, because it sounded so familiar about our both "pursuing parallel development of massive projects." I've thought about nominating myself "for your committee's assessment and approval," because my thinking is very much in-line with your more academic way of thinking.

I'm a Pennsylvania State University graduate, and I'm very proud of that, because that is where I turned my brain on completely, into working in my higher gear, and because that is where I learned not to be ashamed of my own personal opinions and perspectives, even though most of the people around me always disagreed with my more conservative Christian tendencies.

On Friday 07 July 2006 23:20, Michael R. Irwin wrote:

Eric R. Meyers wrote:

...

snip

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.

You might consider setting up a Perl learning community at Wikiversity. In the short run it might consist of as little as concise summaries about links to other online Perl resources.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity:School_of_Computer_Science

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Software_Engineering

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity:School_of_Informatics

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity:School_of_Library_and_Information_ Science

As you can see there are a number of places where an active Perl community might be placed. If you prefer front page billing and feel the community will grow large enough to justify it feel free to put a "School of Perl" or "The Oysterbed" in the initial index page.

For your information Wikiversity is currently in an indefinite holding pattern. The links above are at a prototyping site within Wikibooks. Once final authorization to proceed is received we will probably duplicate the existing Wikibooks wiki and then delete or modify inappropriate materials at Wikibooks and at the permanent en.wikiversity.org wiki domain.

If you speak German the de.wikiversity.org domain is already active and would probably welcome a large Perl prescence to assist in creating their wiki.

I hope you decide to checkout Wikiversity. Good luck wherever you decide to publish or participate.

If Wikiversity looks too raw and unorganized for your purposes of focusing on Perl, please checkback in a few years. Some of us expect a fairly rapid growth curve once the final wiki domain is active.

regards, lazyquasar _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Michael, as you can probably tell, I'm very into prototyping new systems.

How can an apparently illiterate collection of people in this world possibly learn what The Truth really is today, if they don't get to learn from the present day experts to educate themselves about what The Truth really means.

We live in a very complex world of utter informational mayhem and mass confusion, and most people only spin The Truth for their own immediate personal benefit, without showing any sincere regard for the others around them who are just trying to live in peace. I'm a complete believer in Jesus Christ, who said that he is "the way, the truth and the life," and no one comes to the Father except through him. I'm a living Good Samaritan, even though I've found that others don't even bother to return the favor to me, when I need some sincere help during my times of personal troubles.

How can anyone possibly know what The Truth is today?

Proverbs 23:12 (NIV): Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge.

The Truth is always the truth, no matter how you look at it, and no matter how many times or different ways you discover to look at it, it still rings true with a pure resonance of something very real called the truth. Lies are simply imaginary things, they have no pure resonance, and they will always fail the ultimate test for The Truth, and that is our multiply shared opinions and our commonly shared perspectives. Each of us has our own opinions and perspectives, but when we share the same opinions and perspectives, then we have come a little closer to what The Truth really is today. We all have to become more tolerant with each other, for the sake of having sincere and honest discussions in pursuit of The Truth, because The Truth is what really matters to all of us. The Truth is "The Right Way" to live our daily lives.

A good, free and open "Wikiversity" higher education is a very worthy goal.

I'm in to that too, so please let me know how I can help, because I will always advocate "The Right Stuff."

Sincerely,

Eric