I'd like to start a discussion based on an opinion I noted in a previous thread[1] -- the preferred use of a Wiki as opposed to static HTML for some of what we currently have living in our webspace.
Currently, the trunk/www directory on subversion.tigris.org has 64 HTML files of various mixed purposes -- project information, open letters to Some Body, testimonials, merge tracking design documents, Tigris.org navigation overrides, and so on. For the most part, they are all lumped into a single flat directory structure. Many of the HTML files in there are effectively static; some change more often. Some of the information there is the sort that's sanctioned by the project as a whole; some (like our links page) could arguably stand to be more community-maintained. In my experience (which is admittedly somewhat limited here), there are going to be pros and cons to using a wiki. Wikis tend to offer, shall we say, less-than-ideal control over the look and feel of the pages as a whole, and less-fine-grained control over individual UI elements. Paragraphs, lists, and links all over the place are nice, safe, wiki-friendly content classes. You start getting into tables and images and custom stylations on page elements and divisions, and you find yourself reaching more often for the ibuprofen. And while the wiki syntax is intended to be somewhat liberating to folks who don't want to mess with HTML tags, it can be someone restrictive in its particular interpretation of whitespace and indentation and stuff, too. That said, good wikis tend to be forgiving when accessing non-existent pages, offering options to search for the content you thought you were looking for. They offer history of changes more readily to users. But unless you're opening up the wiki to community editing, there's not a pleasant way for random passers-by to suggest changes (they can't just send a patch file). So, here's my first question (because if we don't get past this one, nothing else matters): To what degree are folks interesting in moving some of our web content (and possibly other stuff, too, like our notes/ contents) into a wiki? NOTE: I'm making two assumptions here: (1) that we would never consider using a Wiki that didn't send page change notifications to our commits@ list (or maybe a dedicated wiki@), and (2) that any wiki service that the ASF provided would be covered by their backup mechanisms. What say you? -- C-Mike [1] http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2009-11/0821.shtml -- C. Michael Pilato <cmpil...@collab.net> CollabNet <> www.collab.net <> Distributed Development On Demand
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