Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Revisiting hosted wiki software

[Noah Slater]

On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 08:37:04AM +0100, Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 06:20:28AM +0000, Noah Slater wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 01:30:15AM +0100, Karl Berry wrote:
> > > My understanding follows ...
> > >
> > >     I spent a bit of time thinking about this and wondered why this was
> > >     any more of an issue on a wiki than a public mailing list,
> > >
> > > On a mailing list, it is clear that any given message comes from its 
> > > author.
> > > Therefore the views of a random poster can't be reasonably mistaken for 
> > > the
> > > views of GNU.
> > >
> > > This is not true on a wiki.  If the url ends in .gnu.org, it is in fact 
> > > likely
> > > that a casual reader will assume that pretty much everything is said and
> > > linked on there is approved by GNU.
> >
> > Ah, this is a good point that I had not thought about.
>
> So if I understand correctly, a closed wiki restricted to GNU projects
> members wouldn't have this problem - just like webpages.

Nope, but that counteracts the benefits that I see in a wiki.

One the biggest sources of documentation surrounding CouchDB is the wiki:

  http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/

Regular uses come along and post tutorials, installation guides, fixes, tips and
pointers, links to websites using CouchDB, people using CouchDB and all the
other usual good stuff you want to see a community sharing around a project.

Two other examples that I use very regularly are the Mutt wiki:

  http://wiki.mutt.org/

... and of course, the Emacs wiki:

  http://www.emacswiki.org/

I think the value of these sites comes from letting *users* contribute and as
long as there is maintenance by the project owners, this should be workable.

-- 
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater