On 6/18/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence@gmail.com> wrote:
It occurred to me that this may also be relevant here, given the
apparently pending deletion of content in:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Source_code

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller < eloquence@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 19, 2006 5:03 AM
Subject: Literate Programs wiki
To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org, Wikimedia textbook discussion
< textbook-l@wikimedia.org>


A very interesting wiki I just discovered:
http://en.literateprograms.org/LiteratePrograms:Welcome

They allow you to post source code of any computer program in any
language, comment it, etc. They have a very neat extension which
allows you to download a tarball of all the programs documented on a
particular page. The code can be broken up into pieces so that
individual sections of a program can be discussed in more detail. The
pieces on a page can then be associated with files using an internal
transclusion.

The extension pieces the stuff together again. It also does syntax
highlighting for a lot of languages.

I'm posting this to textbook-l and wikipedia-l because I know there
are a lot of computer programming related pages on both wikis that
could make use of this resource. Given the URL, the project also seems
to be aiming for multilinguality. I actually think it would make a
nice addition to the Wikimedia project family, if a bit specialized.

Erik
 
Wow, thanks for finding this, Erik.  This is a very interesting wiki.  If Wikibooks doesn't take all of our source code, I would definitely be open to uploading it there, as many of the programs are for instructive purposes as well (they've got Hello World in about 1,000 different programming languages).  Actually, though, maybe it would be beneficial to add it to LiterateWiki *anyway* given what Literate Programs can do with source code...
 
 
I actually think it would make a
nice addition to the Wikimedia project family, if a bit specialized.

I would agree to that, and would support such a proposal.  It would finally end the problems that all Wikimedia projects have faced or will face at some point or another regarding source code, but, more importantly, it would give WMF an outlet for an open source code wiki.  It seems as if Literate Programs' mission is reasonably similar to ours--only a little tweaking in the mission statements and a complete overhaul of the copyright licensing would be needed to make this a suitable candidate for a WMF project.