[Foundation-l] merge wikis

[Robin McCain]

It seems silly to proliferate so many wikis when many of them focus on 
related issues. It becomes the nightmare of having to visit the web site 
of every user group every few hours vs having all the new posts sent via 
email to one address so you save time.  The real question to me seems to 
be how to make the software capable of sharing data across silos. Our 
hardware is much more robust than 10 years ago, our software has matured 
and now it is time to do content aggregation. We can (and probably 
should) use the name with the widest recognition as the root of our 
tree. Then all the branches can continue to function "as if" they were 
independent for a time - even though they are part of the same trunk. 
Over time their quirks will need to be harmonized and fiefdoms 
consolidated into a coherent whole.

We already use disambiguation pages to distinguish between topics with 
similar names, go one step further and have a multiple articles page. 
Some contributors have great insight but terrible writing skills and 
that is where the skills of an editor are needed. Having to police all 
the differing opinions of supposedly factual matters is more of a 
censorship (shudder - who will watch the watchers?) or judicial 
function. Thank goodness for the page history function.

I've setup and used several wikis inhouse, and currently run MediaWiki 
on the server. The biggest problem I have is with user fears - fear of 
creating a new page, fear of doing something someone else "should" be 
doing, learning curve issues. Currently teams are working on a better 
GUI experience that will (hopefully) make it much easier for a new user 
to be able to contribute productive work without having to learn a new 
programming language. Creating a disambiguation page is a good example 
of something that should be relatively easy to do the first time rather 
than spend 3 or 4 hours learning how to do it in the current wiki 
programming environment.