Wikis [was: Re: Tutorial]

[John Mandereau]

Valentin Villenave wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> I may be out-topic, but I would like to talk about how useful Wiki
> applications might be to Lily...
> 
> For instance, Christophe Dang Ngoc Chan has started writing a quite
> good Wikibook, based on the official tutorial. 
> 
> http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_%C3%A0_LilyPond
> 
> Currently it is only in French, but as he told me, he would be ready
> to start another one in English. I find it would be a very good idea
> to open some Wiki-based Lilypond tutorial, or unofficial
> Documentation. This would make corrections much easier and simpler,
> and moreover this could help promoting Lilypond, since the
> Wikibooks-Wikipedia community is huge and very active. 
> 
> And if you like the Wiki idea, I'd like to add that there may be
> several opportunities to combine Wiki and Lilypond typesetting ; for
> instance one could imagine some extension like LaTex-oriented
> Wikipublisher ( http://www.wikipublisher.org/wiki/ ), but especially
> designed for Lilypond...


There is already an unofficial wiki on
http://lilypondwiki.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

It's easy to start a new wiki, a new documentation, a new whatever, but
it's much harder to develop it on a long timescale.

Before reinventing the wheel, we should first look for what already
exists (or has existed). To be more precise:

1) you may find it instructive to read previous discussions on the
lilyond-{devel,usr} lists by searching the lists with the keyword
"wiki".

2) Johannes Schindelin has already developped a Mediawiki extension that
can run LilyPond.

3) In the past, there was in the footer of each HTML page of the
documentation a link to a dedicated wiki page, where users could add
comments. As long as an available LilyPond wiki exists, it might be good
to add this footer back. In that case, it would avoid duplicating the
official documentation, and still allow making comments/corrections
easily.


As Graham and others have already pointed out, it'd be very cumbersome
for the user to look for documentation at a dozen of places. Computer
music engraving, and thus LilyPond, are so specialized that cluttered
and concurrent sources of informations would really be a pain.
IMHO everyone should think twice about it before creating a new source
of information.

Cheers,
-- 
John Mandereau <address@hidden>