Re: Emacs Wiki Revision History

[Alex Schroeder]

On 23 Okt., 22:43, Xah <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Criticism is not complaining, and even complaining is a significant
> form of contribution when done naturally. A significant contribution
> of major philosophers to society throughout history, is to criticize
> or complain.

Then again, philosophers don't have the option of doing. The same is
true for public works, governments in general, basically anything that
you can't do in your free time by yourself.

But writing software and writing text is different. The know-how is
there, the ability is there, the tools are free and available.

It's not the same thing.

> “Complaining” is not necessarily inferior to “doing”. A
> healthy, prosperous community, needs both.

I disagree. A community with people that keep complaining without
contributing is a community that I don't want to contribute to.

> For example, why do you fork UseModWiki 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UseModWiki
> ) in the first place? In some tech geeker's sense, you are reinventing
> the wheel.

Indeed, why did I? Did you check? Have you read up on the history of
UseModWiki? I guess you haven't, or you'd know.

> if i quietly grabbed your emacswiki content (which is perfectly legal
> and guaranteed a right under FSF associated licenses) and shape it in
> the way i think is proper (i.e. using MediaWiki), effective a fork,
> such deed is often controversial as you must know, and often it spur
> animosity among groups and create factions.

Sure. But such is your freedom. And you don't have to grab it quietly.
I invite you to do it. Please do it.

> I can, and i might, take your blessing and create a alternative
> emacswiki, or even consume emacswiki.org with your help. That takes a
> lot dedication, time, and some money to do it.

Well, it depends. You could start with hosting for USD 5 per month at
hcoop.net and a domain name for EUR 12 a year, as far as I can tell.
And remember, once you've proven that you can do it, we'll have a
vote. If people vote for your site, I'll give you control over the
domain name emacswiki.org. Yes, it'll be a bummer for my personal
page, and for my dad's blog, and for my godchild, but I'm willing to
make that sacrifice because I don't want to stand in the way of
progress. If you can serve Emacs' interest better than I can, then I
want to support you. I really do.

> As i mentioned,
> MediaWiki interface is familiar to some one hundred of thousand time
> more users than OddMuse, and there are perhaps hundreds times more
> tools to work with MediaWiki than OddMuse.

Yes, but who needs them? Oddmuse also has benefits over Mediawiki that
you seem to be unaware of, or uninterested in. That's ok, I don't
mind.

> With MediaWiki, you also
> automatically have a lot features, such as images, math formula
> formatting, display of audio, citation, category, syntax highlighting,
> language support, each of these far more robust and diverse than
> OddMuse if it support it. These features, seemingly not much useful
> for a wiki for emacs, but you'd be surprised what people do and how
> things grow. (for one example, emacs wiki could use lots of
> screenshots, and with that, you'll eventually need MediaWiki's image
> annotation and citation features)

You are right. Then again, Oddmuse also offers many extensions. I
guess I'd be more interested in developing new extensions or improving
existing extensions for Oddmuse instead of migrating it all to
Mediawiki and giving those extensions a try. Really, somebody will
have to do the work of migrating the wiki to Mediawiki. There's no way
around that. No amount of Mediawiki praise will make that work easier.
Somebody has to do it. You could be that person. You should try to be
that person.

> one reason you cited against MediaWiki is that it's rather difficult
> or complex to install. I agree OddMuse is far more easier to install.
> (just one perl file) However, you are a expert in the Web App field,
> and so am i. For a web app professional, to install MediaWiki, with
> its associated database etc, isn't that hard. Even i haven't done so,
> i think you'll agree, that it takes within 1 week man hour to install
> it with all content transferred from emacswiki.

Excellent. You seem to be well suited for the job! This is a great
opportunity.

> As you detailed, OddMuse is pretty much just your pet project. That
> and its simplicity is pretty much the reasons you use it for
> emacswiki. As project gets large, this cannot be remain so without
> hampering the growth of emacswiki.

It is a strange conclusion to draw, but that's ok. I thought that the
main problem in wiki growth and maintenance is the text, not the
software. But I could be wrong. Once you have a working site with all
the necessary extensions, URL rewrites, redirections, maintenance
jobs, and interfaces to other systems such as the Emacs Lisp List, it
will be much easier to see whether the new software will allow Emacs
Wiki to grow and improve faster.

> I think some guideline is sufficient. The gist is that, someone needs
> to provide that guideline, or give a indication that coherent article
> is the goal as opposed to maintaining a conversation of wiki editors.
> In this case, that someone should be you, because you are the original
> creator and thus most suitable and authoritative.

Then again, this is not how I want to run a community. If I have any
authority at all, that would not be the way I want to use it. Perhaps
that's why I have some authority – because people know I'll not get on
their nerves. Then again, since I practically never use it, we'll
never know for sure whether I have any.

I think the onus falls on you to lead by your own example; your social
skills and your coding skills will prove your right or wrong. And you
don't even have to do all the coding yourself. With enough social
skills you'll encourage others to join your project and you'll be able
to focus on the usability issues you've identified. I'm wishing you
all the best!

> This guideline or indication is important. For example, sometimes i
> thought about cleaning out the discussion-oriented texts... which
> usually means simply delete them. However, if done, it'll raise a lot
> problems. People will revert it, ask why you delete them, considering
> it removal of record, resulting quarrel or unease, or even consider it
> absolute vandal.

Absolutely. And if you read through Emacs Wiki, you will in fact find
some guidelines. I hope that they're subtle and not too invonvenient.
I fear that what you have in mind will be a lot less inviting, but it
will be up to you to try.

> I being already a controversial figure. As you know, i've been ban'd
> in freenodes's emacs irc, while you were intimately familiar with the
> deal, which is also associated with the emacswiki. 
> (seehttp://xahlee.org/emacs/xah_ban_emacs_irc.html) If i start to, as you
> say, “contribute” by editing of the article of removing conversations,
> that's not gonna go well. Note the fact that the quality of many pages
> there are in very bad quality as considered as a article. The editing
> effort will pretty much mean lots of brainless deletions if it is to
> be meaningful ... some of these conversation contains valuable info,
> but the discussion style makes it hard to extract info or a huge
> amount of editing effort.

You are right on all accounts. You are controversial, banned, and
editing other people's text needs lots of social skills. I'm afraid I
cannot offer you any help on any of these topics. These are complex
issues and have no easy answers.

> In short, there needs to be some authoritative guideline. Then, the
> conversation styled dialogues of the wiki would wane. Without such a
> guideline, and letting tech geekers go freely on what each think is
> best, is not likely to make emacswiki coherent anytime soon. Large
> projects requires a leadership. Richard Stallman, is a good example
> here.

Well, we agree in that projects need leadership. But what you're in
fact doing is saying that I am a project leader and I should lead my
project differently. If I am not the project leader you think I am,
then we're back to the previous point about your social skills. If I
am in fact the project leader you think I am, then I'd argue that
perhaps I am because of the way I decided to lead the project –
chaning that policy will be tricky. Who knows, I might end up loosing
my leadership position. That's also why forking is the easier answer.
Note that this is very similar to how oral traditions work. In the
area of martial arts and eastern schools of enlightenment, for
example, we have an oral tradition. Some things are very difficult to
express in words, which is why you cannot write it down. Thus there
are no (good) books to learn it from, and you need a "master" to teach
you. And the master's qualification is again given by his own master.
Thus, knowledge is passed from master to apprentice. This necessitates
the belief that you master is right and knows it all. It leads to
ideas of a gold age when things were perfect, or of enlightened
founders that had perfected a particular technique or school or
thought. In this case, if you discover that you want to change
something, there's no way of doing that within your own school. You
will have to break away and create your own school. You effectively
fork! That's why we have so many martial arts schools. Over fifty
schools of Kung-Fu! And even rather recent things like Aikido have
alreay splintered into different schools.

Thus, oral traditions favor forking. Questions of social capital favor
forking.

But enough of this pseudo science. Back to the business at hand.

You should fork the Emacs Wiki and try your ideas. If you fail, I hope
you'll agree that I'm under no obligation to change either the tools I
use, nor the way I run the project.

Think about it this way. Assume that Emacs Wiki was run by a
democracy. What would be the thing to do if you're unhappy? You start
by writing about your unhappiness. And then you start a party. Collect
people that will vote for you, assemble a team of people that can take
over maintainership. Fortunately in the electronic world, we can try
the new government before we kick out the old government. You can
prove your worth before people need to choose. You'll agree that this
is much better than what we have in our world of Realpolitik.

> In summary, there are 2 things i'm saying, and have tried to say to
> you 2 or 3 years ago, albeit perhaps in a terse manner. One is to
> adopt WikiMedia, instead feeling attached to your personal code. (2)
> It needs a authoritative guideline for emacswiki to grow.

I hope that all the time I've spent arguing with you has paid off at
last and that you understand the reasons why I reject your two
suggestions. Not only do I reject them for the reasons above, I also
went above and beyond my social obligations in order to show you a way
out of this impasse: There is a way for you to get the cake, and eat
it too.

> For (2), please dont think it is some Big Brother heavy hand on
> control. The guidelines needs not be harsh, strict, or even enforced.
> However, it is necessary, that there is such a guideline, and it be
> required reading for emacswiki editors. (think of Richard Stallman's
> GNU Manifesto, who actually goes to the trouble of going into
> legalities with its GPL and FSF corporation.)

Sure. I just don't agree with your guidelines and that's that. See
above for a way out.

Good luck
Alex

PS: Why was this discussion crossposted to both g.e.help and c.emacs?
It seems like a waste of bandwidth.