Re: [Fwd: Re: really attracting developers]

[MJ Ray]

"Nikolaus Waxweiler" <madleser@gmx.de>
> [...] And why should a wiki not be appropriate for an app db?

I'm sure I wrote suboptimal, not inappropriate.  Applications have lots of
metadata about them - some of it you can bodge into a wiki with Category
tags and so on, but not much.  Consider how much easier it is to find
an application on Freshmeat than a whole-web search engine.

> What does the release or popularity of a project have to do with using a=
> wiki as the homepage?

Volume of material to store, for one.

> The Amarok wiki looks fine to me. What exactly is =
> your problem with it?

I don't find white on white to be a nice colour combination.  Maybe your
eyes work normally and you have your browser default to black-on-white?

[...]
> Which browser are you using? What keeps you from accepting cookies just =
> for the wiki if you know it requires them?

It depends which device I'm using, but the cookie requirements of the
mediawiki seem not documented anywhere on it.  Yes, I could step through
and yes/no each cookie, but that's a PITA.  Why don't you fix the wiki?

> I have never heard of P3P so I neither know nor care, but you can easily=
> copy the wiki text to some file and edit it offline :) Same way you'd ed=
> it anything else offline.

This is part of the problem - WikiFarmers seem to be ignorant of web
technology like P3P or WCAG and don't care.  Most seem happy with the
idea of survival of the fittest and see obstructing others are part of
showing their fitness.  Surprisingly given that, they also seem to be
ignorant of history and unwilling to research, such as why the hostname
was mediawiki.gnustep.org for a while.

I edit stuff offline by synchronising online, editing offline, then
synchronising again when I get back online.  Copy-pasting between text
files and browser is very primitive - it would nuke other later changes
on upload, wouldn't it?

> That was a reference to how a wiki (here: Mediawiki) facilitates pointers
> to [[other article]]s on the same wiki. Well, I tried.

That seems stupid of mediawiki to pick the []s traditionally used to mark
editorial changes of quotes.  Wiki uses CamelCase for links.

> > Really, posting guides to gnustep.org (except as archive copies) is
> > a poor substitute for getting articles about gnustep out there [...]
> What do you mean by "archive copies"? Stuff you can easily print out?

I mean copies kept on gnustep.org in case the original goes off-line.

> I already stated that I have no problem with that per se -- it's just that=
> with writing a texinfo article, the author has to update it himself and =
> whatnot. If he loses interest in that or just vanishes or something,  =
> someone else has to take over and blablabla.

I think it's good that authors can use texinfo *if they want to*.  If any
author vanishes, there's going to be some pain to take it over, and a
markup conversion is just another part of that.  That said, texinfo has
been around a lot longer than mediawiki's not-quite-wiki markup and is
more consistent across platforms.  No-one has to use texinfo for things
on the web if they don't want to, though.

One big plus of document-style markup is that we can format them into
whatever is the current 'house style' without needing to enforce a tight
style guide like discussed in
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnustep/2006-09/msg00189.html
Single-site wiki markup rules seem far worse than one author using texinfo.

> It's just easier to update
> information about moving targets when having them all in a central place=
> where more than one person can edit them.

As noted before, it's harder to publicise.

> Also, the whole web already uses Wikipedia, so there's nothing wrong abo=
> ut that :O.

Wikipedia is an interesting experiment, but terrible as an
information source and people who rely on it make some hilarious
mistakes.  For one example, Wikipedia use resulted in an insult
replacing a language name on some Elephants Dream DVD menus.
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/07/16/1345246.shtml  Then there are
other problems like biggest-network-pipe-wins, the right-of-centre NPOV
and attribution stripping.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJR/slef