Re: choice of term "WikiStatus"

I think it would be good to make sure we don't equate the world of wikis with Wikipedia. Wikipedia may be the most well-known and important wiki, but the world of wikis as I'm sure everyone here knows is much broader and more diverse than even Wikipedia.

I'm making this point after seeing some (influential?!) bloggers start equating wikis with Wikipedia, which helps nobody. (Neither will Wikipedia benefit from being equated with the LA Times desaster, nor will wikis be helped by being viewed through Encyclopedia glasses.)

I recognize that you use WikiStatus only as a shorthand for Wikipedia Status and spell it out most of the time, but sometimes acronyms take on a life of their own, say if you register a domain for it.

Thanks, Dirk

At 26.11.2005, Edward Z. Yang wrote:

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OpenFact's Wikipedia Status ( http://tinyurl.com/48a5m ) is the original Wikipedia Status page. However, it suffers from a huge problem: it is prohibitively unwieldly to use. The solution? Create a more streamlined application designed for the exact task of allowing the community to report on contingency issues. Yup... it's called WikiStatus for lack of a more creative name.

You can view an online version of it here: http://tinyurl.com/a62lu and the source code is here: http://tinyurl.com/b9z8n

I'm not sure when/how OpenFacts became the de facto standard for status reporting, but it would be cool if we could add a link to WikiStatus from the standard error page. Of course, it's really new software (I consider it alpha quality) and it probably needs to be audited, but when there's a problem, there should be multiple contingency sites.

Please check it out! Thanks. :D

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Dr. Dirk Riehle | Bayave Software GmbH | http://www.bayave.de Contact: dirk@riehle.org | +49 172 184 8755 | http://www.riehle.org Interested in wiki research? Please see http://www.wikisym.org!