Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: future of the wiki

[Zack Brown]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 12:11:42AM -0400, Douglas Philips wrote:
> On Wednesday, Aug 27, 2003, at 18:00 US/Eastern, Zack Brown wrote:
> 
> >On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 06:19:39PM -0400, Miles Bader wrote:
> >>So while I the idea of community-maintained web pages, I cringe at the
> >>thought of the home page being a wiki.
> >
> >Why not have the web page be an arch-ive? Then newcomers could learn 
> >more
> >about arch by using it to put what they learned back into the web site.
> 
> Noooooooooooooooo.
> 
> It was bad enough that I joined the old mailing list. Had no idea why 
> there was no traffic. Figured the project must be dead. Went looking 
> into the archives to see if there had been anything, and found that the 
> list had moved.
> 
> TWiki (Wikis) in general are designed to be easy. I've read through the 
> hello world example doc about three times so far. If I had to use arch 
> to get started on the website, it'd just never happen. The reason I'm 
> attracted to arch is to be able to work offline for a day or two at a 
> time, and yet still have a central repository for backups and for 
> coordinating with my cohorts. But I just don't see how using arch for a 
> wiki replacement makes any sense. Nothing about arch has to do with 
> presentation, yet a wiki is all about presentation and being able to 
> use _any_ barely functional web interface to read and update it.

Using arch for the web pages doesn't have to be terribly difficult. the
web pages themselves could contain extremely simple recipes for checking
out that particular archive, downloading updates, and checking in
changesets. Anyone with the slightest confusion could simply consult the
web page for the cut-n-paste command.

Wiki's suffer from the problem that they tend to be extremely disorganized. I
found it almost impossible to get anything useful from the Wiki. I think a
focused, well organized web page requires that people be able to do lots of
reorganization very quickly, as need dictates. The kind of reorganization
that is best done at the filesystem level, and not through various web
forms. Reorganizing a Wiki is actually quite difficult, because each little
operation requires a number of convoluted web manipulations, with no way to
get a bird's-eye-view of the changes being made.

Better than a Wiki would be just a tarball of the web site, and let
people submit patches by email, like olden times. That's simple enough
and familiary to all. Personally, I'd prefer to use arch, but almost
anything would be better than a Wiki, IMO.

Be well,
Zack

> 
> Just my buck two-fitty,
>       <D\'gou
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Zack Brown