[gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 3 April 2010 11:46, Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 04/03/10 11:16, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
>> People are constantly asking for a documentation wiki, but ...
> yeah, as long as no one just creates a wiki there won't be one. People
> are waiting on other people, who are waiting for Godot. Just do it.
>
> I remember the long and whiny road to get a blog aggregator - what
> killed the waiting deadlock was simply karltk setting up one (unofficial
> etc.etc.) and suddenly people saw that it was good.


Okay, so it seems a lot of people do want a wiki. So let's see what
we can do to make that happen.

1 - requirements
================

In order to choose the best possible wiki implementation, we need to
know our requirements. So what features do you think are essential or
good to have? What syntax would we prefer to use?

I myself am a big fan of reStructuredText, which is quite simple,
easy to pick up, highly readable, and has a good featureset. Plus, it
is also reusable in other contexts (it is for example widely used in
documentation of Python libraries). MediaWiki, MoinMoin and Trac have
support for rst.

Some others:

- active upstream (bug fixes, security updates)
- free open source software
- ACLs
- spam prevention measures
- attachments (to upload screenshots for example)
- feeds

Other distros and open source projects surely have had the same
considerations. Can we find out and learn from them?


2 - maintainers
===============

Who is volunteering for maintaining the wiki? We need editors and
moderators, people who look out for quality control and take care of
spam removal. So let's get together a team. I'm sure if we ask on the
forums we'll get some users interested as well.


3 - edit access
===============

Do we keep to the original "free for all" model, with all the spam
that includes, or do we go with registered users only? I think the
latter is the smarter option. I also think we will want to mark
certain pages "official" and lock down editing rights.


Is there anything else we should consider before getting started?

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Dror Levin]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 16:19, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 1 - requirements
> ================
>
> In order to choose the best possible wiki implementation, we need to
> know our requirements. So what features do you think are essential or
> good to have? What syntax would we prefer to use?
>
> I myself am a big fan of reStructuredText, which is quite simple,
> easy to pick up, highly readable, and has a good featureset. Plus, it
> is also reusable in other contexts (it is for example widely used in
> documentation of Python libraries). MediaWiki, MoinMoin and Trac have
> support for rst.
>
> Some others:
>
> - active upstream (bug fixes, security updates)
> - free open source software
> - ACLs
> - spam prevention measures
> - attachments (to upload screenshots for example)
> - feeds
There is currently a wiki for gentoo at gentoo-wiki.com, which is
running MediaWiki, so it would be easiest to transfer the content if
we were to run the same software. Now, this doesn't mean we should be
limited by their actions, but it seems to me like the best choice for
other reasons as well. Its syntax is probably the most well known,
thanks to Wikipedia. Its upstream is active, it apparently scales and
performs pretty well, it's GPL, supports translations/localization,
feeds, attachments, etc.
I'm sure many other alternatives are as qualified, so this is most
likely a personal preference issue. As such, lets just agree on
something that works and is widespread and go with that and avoid all
the bikeshedding.

> 2 - maintainers
> ===============
>
> Who is volunteering for maintaining the wiki? We need editors and
> moderators, people who look out for quality control and take care of
> spam removal. So let's get together a team. I'm sure if we ask on the
> forums we'll get some users interested as well.
I volunteer. Spam shouldn't be that much of an issue if editing is
restricted to registered users, but it is a good idea to have a team
of moderators similar to the one that exists for the forums (of course
users can take part of it as well as developers).

> 3 - edit access
> ===============
>
> Do we keep to the original "free for all" model, with all the spam
> that includes, or do we go with registered users only? I think the
> latter is the smarter option. I also think we will want to mark
> certain pages "official" and lock down editing rights.
IMO it's best if only registered users can edit (but registering
should be easy, no bugs to file or anything, just sign up and use
immediately). This will probably prevent most kinds of spam and allow
for much better tracking of editing and history, allow for banning,
etc. without closing the wiki up too much.
Also, from what I could tell, this is how others are managing their
wiki as well (Arch and Amarok, for example).

Dror Levin

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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Am Samstag, den 03.04.2010, 16:40 +0300 schrieb Dror Levin:
> There is currently a wiki for gentoo at gentoo-wiki.com, which is
> running MediaWiki, so it would be easiest to transfer the content if
> we were to run the same software.

This should happen (if at all) on a per article basis imho. Having the
option to do so (if we want to) is a plus we should consider, though.

> Now, this doesn't mean we should be
> limited by their actions, but it seems to me like the best choice for
> other reasons as well. Its syntax is probably the most well known,
> thanks to Wikipedia. Its upstream is active, it apparently scales and
> performs pretty well, it's GPL, supports translations/localization,
> feeds, attachments, etc.
> I'm sure many other alternatives are as qualified, so this is most
> likely a personal preference issue. As such, lets just agree on
> something that works and is widespread and go with that and avoid all
> the bikeshedding.

Mediawiki sounds like what we want probably, mainly because it seems to
be the most popular one.

Besides that:
- Ubuntu and Debian are using MoinMoin
- Fedora and OpenSUSE use Mediawiki


> > 2 - maintainers
> > ===============
> >
> > Who is volunteering for maintaining the wiki? We need editors and
> > moderators, people who look out for quality control and take care of
> > spam removal. So let's get together a team. I'm sure if we ask on the
> > forums we'll get some users interested as well.
> I volunteer. Spam shouldn't be that much of an issue if editing is
> restricted to registered users, but it is a good idea to have a team
> of moderators similar to the one that exists for the forums (of course
> users can take part of it as well as developers).

It's not that I'm able to invest really much time for this, but if it's
needed to get this finally rolling - count me in. Plus it shouldn't be
much of an issue, if editing is limited to registered users (at least
when speaking of Spam).

> IMO it's best if only registered users can edit (but registering
> should be easy, no bugs to file or anything, just sign up and use
> immediately). This will probably prevent most kinds of spam and allow
> for much better tracking of editing and history, allow for banning,
> etc. without closing the wiki up too much.

Fully ack.

In addition I'd like to establish a Wiki team with both developers and
experienced users who are able to review Wikipages (specifically every
revision of a page) and tag those pages as reviewed. Something not that
difficult, but that'll allow for some QA. See 
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs for reference.

- Tobias

-- 
Praxisbuch Nagios
http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/pbnagiosger/

https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 3 April 2010 16:12, Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Am Samstag, den 03.04.2010, 16:40 +0300 schrieb Dror Levin:
>> There is currently a wiki for gentoo at gentoo-wiki.com, which is
>> running MediaWiki, so it would be easiest to transfer the content if
>> we were to run the same software.
>
> This should happen (if at all) on a per article basis imho. Having the
> option to do so (if we want to) is a plus we should consider, though.

This also raises the question of license. Our current documentation
mostly uses the CC-BY-SA license, while the unoffical wiki adds a
non-commercial restriction. By choosing one license over the other
we will make copy-pasting content from the source that has the other
license, as far as I can see, illegal. I would say that interchange
possibilities with our existing official documentation has priority.

> Mediawiki sounds like what we want probably, mainly because it seems to
> be the most popular one.

I don't think that in itself is a very good argument.

> Besides that:
> - Ubuntu and Debian are using MoinMoin
> - Fedora and OpenSUSE use Mediawiki

I think we should consider the pros and cons of both these solutions.
Does anyone have any links to the considerations that led these
distros to make the choice they did?

> In addition I'd like to establish a Wiki team with both developers and
> experienced users who are able to review Wikipages (specifically every
> revision of a page) and tag those pages as reviewed.

I agree this is a good idea.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Sebastian Pipping]

On 04/03/10 16:36, Ben de Groot wrote:
> This also raises the question of license. Our current documentation
> mostly uses the CC-BY-SA license, while the unoffical wiki adds a
> non-commercial restriction. By choosing one license over the other
> we will make copy-pasting content from the source that has the other
> license, as far as I can see, illegal. I would say that interchange
> possibilities with our existing official documentation has priority.

Good point.  I agree that a restriction against commercial usage does
not work for us.



Sebastian

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Nathan Zachary]

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On 03/04/10 08:40, Dror Levin wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 16:19, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
>   
>> 1 - requirements
>> ================
>>
>> In order to choose the best possible wiki implementation, we need to
>> know our requirements. So what features do you think are essential or
>> good to have? What syntax would we prefer to use?
>>
>> I myself am a big fan of reStructuredText, which is quite simple,
>> easy to pick up, highly readable, and has a good featureset. Plus, it
>> is also reusable in other contexts (it is for example widely used in
>> documentation of Python libraries). MediaWiki, MoinMoin and Trac have
>> support for rst.
>>
>> Some others:
>>
>> - active upstream (bug fixes, security updates)
>> - free open source software
>> - ACLs
>> - spam prevention measures
>> - attachments (to upload screenshots for example)
>> - feeds
>>     
> There is currently a wiki for gentoo at gentoo-wiki.com, which is
> running MediaWiki, so it would be easiest to transfer the content if
> we were to run the same software. Now, this doesn't mean we should be
> limited by their actions, but it seems to me like the best choice for
> other reasons as well. Its syntax is probably the most well known,
> thanks to Wikipedia. Its upstream is active, it apparently scales and
> performs pretty well, it's GPL, supports translations/localization,
> feeds, attachments, etc.
> I'm sure many other alternatives are as qualified, so this is most
> likely a personal preference issue. As such, lets just agree on
> something that works and is widespread and go with that and avoid all
> the bikeshedding.
>
>   
>> 2 - maintainers
>> ===============
>>
>> Who is volunteering for maintaining the wiki? We need editors and
>> moderators, people who look out for quality control and take care of
>> spam removal. So let's get together a team. I'm sure if we ask on the
>> forums we'll get some users interested as well.
>>     
> I volunteer. Spam shouldn't be that much of an issue if editing is
> restricted to registered users, but it is a good idea to have a team
> of moderators similar to the one that exists for the forums (of course
> users can take part of it as well as developers).
>
>   
>> 3 - edit access
>> ===============
>>
>> Do we keep to the original "free for all" model, with all the spam
>> that includes, or do we go with registered users only? I think the
>> latter is the smarter option. I also think we will want to mark
>> certain pages "official" and lock down editing rights.
>>     
> IMO it's best if only registered users can edit (but registering
> should be easy, no bugs to file or anything, just sign up and use
> immediately). This will probably prevent most kinds of spam and allow
> for much better tracking of editing and history, allow for banning,
> etc. without closing the wiki up too much.
> Also, from what I could tell, this is how others are managing their
> wiki as well (Arch and Amarok, for example).
>
> Dror Levin
>
>   
I would enjoy working on a wiki as well as the fora, so I'm volunteering
as well.

--Nathan Zachary

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[AllenJB]

On 03/04/10 14:40, Dror Levin wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 16:19, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> 2 - maintainers
>> ===============
>>
>> Who is volunteering for maintaining the wiki? We need editors and
>> moderators, people who look out for quality control and take care of
>> spam removal. So let's get together a team. I'm sure if we ask on the
>> forums we'll get some users interested as well.
> I volunteer. Spam shouldn't be that much of an issue if editing is
> restricted to registered users, but it is a good idea to have a team
> of moderators similar to the one that exists for the forums (of course
> users can take part of it as well as developers).
> 
Most of the spam on gentoo-wiki.com comes from registered accounts.
Requiring registration does not stop most wiki spam. Very little of the
spam comes in from unregistered editors.


On gentoo-wiki.com we currently use a combination of anti-spam tools,
which seems to work best. The main 2, from a day-to-day administration
view are the url blacklist and manual removal of spam and associated
accounts.

You could require email authentication first, but I believe this is
unlikely to reduce spam - creating a setup that automatically deals with
account verification emails is trivial and throwaway accounts are too
easy to get hold of.

In addition I believe it would reduce the amount of positive
contribution more than it reduces spam - I believe people often want to
make quick, small corrections / additions and telling them to "come back
later" is going to be the same as telling them "go away".

I would highly recommend using MediaWiki as, at least from my
experience, it's the most prevalent of the wiki setups available. While
this may bring some disadvantages (number of spam attempts (tho I'm
nottotally convinced you'll get less than any other web form out there),
etc), it also brings the advantages of being well developed with a wide
variety of plugins, lots of wiki syntax guides / tutorials you can point
users to and a wide userbase with existing knowledge of the syntax.

AllenJB

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[George Prowse]

On 03/04/2010 18:40, AllenJB wrote:
> On 03/04/10 14:40, Dror Levin wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 16:19, Ben de Groot<yngwin@gentoo.org>  wrote:
>>> 2 - maintainers
>>> ===============
>>>
>>> Who is volunteering for maintaining the wiki? We need editors and
>>> moderators, people who look out for quality control and take care of
>>> spam removal. So let's get together a team. I'm sure if we ask on the
>>> forums we'll get some users interested as well.
>> I volunteer. Spam shouldn't be that much of an issue if editing is
>> restricted to registered users, but it is a good idea to have a team
>> of moderators similar to the one that exists for the forums (of course
>> users can take part of it as well as developers).
>>
> Most of the spam on gentoo-wiki.com comes from registered accounts.
> Requiring registration does not stop most wiki spam. Very little of the
> spam comes in from unregistered editors.
>
>
> On gentoo-wiki.com we currently use a combination of anti-spam tools,
> which seems to work best. The main 2, from a day-to-day administration
> view are the url blacklist and manual removal of spam and associated
> accounts.
>
> You could require email authentication first, but I believe this is
> unlikely to reduce spam - creating a setup that automatically deals with
> account verification emails is trivial and throwaway accounts are too
> easy to get hold of.
>
> In addition I believe it would reduce the amount of positive
> contribution more than it reduces spam - I believe people often want to
> make quick, small corrections / additions and telling them to "come back
> later" is going to be the same as telling them "go away".
>
> I would highly recommend using MediaWiki as, at least from my
> experience, it's the most prevalent of the wiki setups available. While
> this may bring some disadvantages (number of spam attempts (tho I'm
> nottotally convinced you'll get less than any other web form out there),
> etc), it also brings the advantages of being well developed with a wide
> variety of plugins, lots of wiki syntax guides / tutorials you can point
> users to and a wide userbase with existing knowledge of the syntax.
>
> AllenJB
>
Does mediawiki have captcha ability?

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Alex Legler]

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On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 19:56:53 +0100, George Prowse
<george.prowse@gmail.com> wrote:

> Does mediawiki have captcha ability?
> 

Yes, there are plug-ins provide that functionality. [1]

Let's get a general Wiki concept done before talking about spam
remedy in detail, though. :)


[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam#Captcha
-- 
Alex Legler | Gentoo Security / Ruby
a3li@gentoo.org | a3li@jabber.ccc.de

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 3 April 2010 20:56, George Prowse <george.prowse@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does mediawiki have captcha ability?

Yes, there are a number of solutions for that.

-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[William Hubbs]

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On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 01:19:32AM +0200, Ben de Groot wrote:
> On 3 April 2010 20:56, George Prowse <george.prowse@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Does mediawiki have captcha ability?
> 
> Yes, there are a number of solutions for that.
 
 I realize I am very late on this thread, but please do not go here
 unless you provide an audio solution as well.  Otherwise, you will
 affectively lock blind users out of the wiki, just as they are
 currentlylocked out of the forums.
http://bugs.gentoo.org/284362

Thanks,

--
William Hubbs
gentoo accessibility team lead
williamh@gentoo.org

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 10 April 2010 06:10, William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 01:19:32AM +0200, Ben de Groot wrote:
>> On 3 April 2010 20:56, George Prowse <george.prowse@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Does mediawiki have captcha ability?
>>
>> Yes, there are a number of solutions for that.
>
>  I realize I am very late on this thread, but please do not go here
>  unless you provide an audio solution as well.  Otherwise, you will
>  affectively lock blind users out of the wiki, just as they are
>  currentlylocked out of the forums.
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/284362

Thank you for bringing that up! We should indeed make sure of accessibility.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Qt project lead developer
Gentoo Wiki project lead

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Dror Levin]

On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 07:10, William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 01:19:32AM +0200, Ben de Groot wrote:
>> On 3 April 2010 20:56, George Prowse <george.prowse@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Does mediawiki have captcha ability?
>>
>> Yes, there are a number of solutions for that.
>
>  I realize I am very late on this thread, but please do not go here
>  unless you provide an audio solution as well.  Otherwise, you will
>  affectively lock blind users out of the wiki, just as they are
>  currentlylocked out of the forums.
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/284362
We are planning to use ReCaptcha which, as far as I known, provides
audio. Please correct me if I'm wrong or if that isn't enough.

Dror Levin

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[William Hubbs]

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On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 03:06:57PM +0300, Dror Levin wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 07:10, William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 01:19:32AM +0200, Ben de Groot wrote:
> >> On 3 April 2010 20:56, George Prowse <george.prowse@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > Does mediawiki have captcha ability?
> >>
> >> Yes, there are a number of solutions for that.
> >
> > ??I realize I am very late on this thread, but please do not go here
> > ??unless you provide an audio solution as well. ??Otherwise, you will
> > ??affectively lock blind users out of the wiki, just as they are
> > ??currentlylocked out of the forums.
> > http://bugs.gentoo.org/284362
> We are planning to use ReCaptcha which, as far as I known, provides
> audio. Please correct me if I'm wrong or if that isn't enough.
 
 Yes, it does.  However, I would tend to question how practical their
 audio captcha is.  Go to www.captcha.net and try the demo a few times
 and see how much luck you have solving audio captchas from it.

--
William Hubbs
gentoo accessibility team lead
williamh@gentoo.org

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[George Prowse]

On 10/04/2010 16:25, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 03:06:57PM +0300, Dror Levin wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 07:10, William Hubbs<williamh@gentoo.org>  wrote:
>>> On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 01:19:32AM +0200, Ben de Groot wrote:
>>>> On 3 April 2010 20:56, George Prowse<george.prowse@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>>> Does mediawiki have captcha ability?
>>>>
>>>> Yes, there are a number of solutions for that.
>>>
>>> ??I realize I am very late on this thread, but please do not go here
>>> ??unless you provide an audio solution as well. ??Otherwise, you will
>>> ??affectively lock blind users out of the wiki, just as they are
>>> ??currentlylocked out of the forums.
>>> http://bugs.gentoo.org/284362
>> We are planning to use ReCaptcha which, as far as I known, provides
>> audio. Please correct me if I'm wrong or if that isn't enough.
>
>   Yes, it does.  However, I would tend to question how practical their
>   audio captcha is.  Go to www.captcha.net and try the demo a few times
>   and see how much luck you have solving audio captchas from it.
>
Is there a better system?

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[William Hubbs]

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On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 04:40:20PM +0100, George Prowse wrote:
> On 10/04/2010 16:25, William Hubbs wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 03:06:57PM +0300, Dror Levin wrote:
> >> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 07:10, William Hubbs<williamh@gentoo.org>  wrote:
> >>> On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 01:19:32AM +0200, Ben de Groot wrote:
> >>>> On 3 April 2010 20:56, George Prowse<george.prowse@gmail.com>  wrote:
> >>>>> Does mediawiki have captcha ability?
> >>>>
> >>>> Yes, there are a number of solutions for that.
> >>>
> >>> ??I realize I am very late on this thread, but please do not go here
> >>> ??unless you provide an audio solution as well. ??Otherwise, you will
> >>> ??affectively lock blind users out of the wiki, just as they are
> >>> ??currentlylocked out of the forums.
> >>> http://bugs.gentoo.org/284362
> >> We are planning to use ReCaptcha which, as far as I known, provides
> >> audio. Please correct me if I'm wrong or if that isn't enough.
> >
> >   Yes, it does.  However, I would tend to question how practical their
> >   audio captcha is.  Go to www.captcha.net and try the demo a few times
> >   and see how much luck you have solving audio captchas from it.
> >
> Is there a better system?
 
 The ideal captcha would not be visual at all.  For example, on another
 site I am involved with, which is not quite online yet, we are talking
 about implementing tseveral levels of captcha such as:

 - a math captcha (you will be asked to solve a simple math problem)
 - a word captcha (fill in the missing letters of a word)
 - a phrase captcha (complete the phrase)

Could something like one or more of these be possible?

--
William Hubbs
gentoo accessibility team lead
williamh@gentoo.org

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[gentoo-dev] Re: [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Duncan]

William Hubbs posted on Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:18:41 -0500 as excerpted:

> - a phrase captcha (complete the phrase)

The thing I've always read about these is that they tend to discriminate 
against those for whom the language isn't their native language.

Math problems are generally agreed to be reasonably universal, however, 
tho that can change if wording is chosen to try to defeat a machine 
solution (running into the language problem again).  Spelling captchas... 
tend to run into problems with folks that can't spell.  That's apparently 
a big enough problem a lot of sites try and reject spelling captchas.

Perhaps a mix such that users can try again with a different category, 
however...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[René 'Necoro' Neumann]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Am 10.04.2010 20:11, schrieb Duncan:
> William Hubbs posted on Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:18:41 -0500 as excerpted:
> 
>> - a phrase captcha (complete the phrase)
> 
> The thing I've always read about these is that they tend to discriminate 
> against those for whom the language isn't their native language.
[...]
> Spelling captchas... 
> tend to run into problems with folks that can't spell.  That's apparently 
> a big enough problem a lot of sites try and reject spelling captchas.

Both points also apply to the audio captcha, as you have to a)
understand the word and b) from this infer the correct writing. Which
becomes even more difficult as English is a language, where the
spelling/pronounciation-relation is quite loose (plus you have
British/American spelling varieties).

- - René
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[gentoo-dev] Re: [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Duncan]

René 'Necoro' Neumann posted on Sat, 10 Apr 2010 20:26:18 +0200 as
excerpted:

> Both points also apply to the audio captcha, as you have to a)
> understand the word and b) from this infer the correct writing. Which
> becomes even more difficult as English is a language, where the
> spelling/pronounciation-relation is quite loose (plus you have
> British/American spelling varieties).

Good point.

Captchas are a bit like radiation or chemo treatments that try to kill the 
cancer (spam) without killing the human, aren't they?  If the anti-cancer/
anti-spam treatment's to be worthwhile at all, it seems one must accept 
that it be potent enough that it will kill some of the good guys in the 
process.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Patrick Nagel]

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Hi William,

On 2010-04-10 17:18 UTC William Hubbs wrote:
> > Is there a better system?
> 
>  The ideal captcha would not be visual at all.  For example, on another
>  site I am involved with, which is not quite online yet, we are talking
>  about implementing tseveral levels of captcha such as:
> 
>  - a math captcha (you will be asked to solve a simple math problem)
>  - a word captcha (fill in the missing letters of a word)
>  - a phrase captcha (complete the phrase)
> 
> Could something like one or more of these be possible?

For MediaWiki, a math captcha would be easy to get in place:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit

I don't know how effective that really simple captcha is, but I know a few 
not-so-large Wikis that use it, and don't have a spam problem. Also, I'm sure 
it would be easy to modify the source to add some more tricks, once the first 
spam bots got past.

Patrick.

-- 
Key ID: 0x86E346D4            http://patrick-nagel.net/key.asc
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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Vincent Launchbury]

On 04/10/10 11:25, William Hubbs wrote:
> Yes, it does.  However, I would tend to question how practical their
> audio captcha is.  Go to www.captcha.net and try the demo a few
> times and see how much luck you have solving audio captchas from it.

Just for reference, I tried 15 different sound clips and got 5 right. 9
were completely incomprehensible, 1 was fuzzy, and the other 5 were
quite clear.

I'd agree that accessibility is important, but if a better solution
doesn't end up working out, ReCaptcha should at least provide access for
blind users, albeit inefficiently.

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Dale]

Vincent Launchbury wrote:
> On 04/10/10 11:25, William Hubbs wrote:
>> Yes, it does.  However, I would tend to question how practical their
>> audio captcha is.  Go to www.captcha.net and try the demo a few
>> times and see how much luck you have solving audio captchas from it.
>
> Just for reference, I tried 15 different sound clips and got 5 right. 9
> were completely incomprehensible, 1 was fuzzy, and the other 5 were
> quite clear.
>
> I'd agree that accessibility is important, but if a better solution
> doesn't end up working out, ReCaptcha should at least provide access for
> blind users, albeit inefficiently.
>
>

Heck, I wear glasses but can see pretty good.  It is hard for me to get 
past the visual thing.  Most of the time when I see a captcha, I just 
say forget it and go elsewhere.  There is nothing worse than trying to 
help someone else and having to spend ten minutes to get past one of 
those things.  Write a 1 minute answer/solution and spend 10 minutes 
trying to answer the captcha.  It just isn't worth all that.

I have never seen the others where you have to complete a word or 
phrase.  I wouldn't even try those.

Dale

:-)  :-)

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[William Hubbs]

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On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 02:04:08PM -0400, Vincent Launchbury wrote:
> On 04/10/10 11:25, William Hubbs wrote:
> > Yes, it does.  However, I would tend to question how practical their
> > audio captcha is.  Go to www.captcha.net and try the demo a few
> > times and see how much luck you have solving audio captchas from it.
> 
> Just for reference, I tried 15 different sound clips and got 5 right. 9
> were completely incomprehensible, 1 was fuzzy, and the other 5 were
> quite clear.
 
 This is the issue with their solution.  I personally have run into
 situations where I have given up because I've tried several audio
 captchas but been unable to understand them well enough to even guess.

> I'd agree that accessibility is important, but if a better solution
> doesn't end up working out, ReCaptcha should at least provide access for
> blind users, albeit inefficiently.
 
 It is better than nothing, but only slightly so.  As you discovered,
 the captchas are quite difficult to solve.

 --
William Hubbs
gentoo accessibility team lead
williamh@gentoo.org

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[George Prowse]

On 10/04/2010 19:04, Vincent Launchbury wrote:
> On 04/10/10 11:25, William Hubbs wrote:
>> Yes, it does. However, I would tend to question how practical their
>> audio captcha is. Go to www.captcha.net and try the demo a few
>> times and see how much luck you have solving audio captchas from it.
>
> Just for reference, I tried 15 different sound clips and got 5 right. 9
> were completely incomprehensible, 1 was fuzzy, and the other 5 were
> quite clear.
>
> I'd agree that accessibility is important, but if a better solution
> doesn't end up working out, ReCaptcha should at least provide access for
> blind users, albeit inefficiently.
>
I was just at Microsoft's site for the hotfix download to fix the 
Advanced Local Procedure Call problem in Server 2008R2 and you need to 
enter a captcha to get the link sent to your email address.

Just as I was about to enter it I thought I would listen to it just for 
the hell of it... I couldn't understand a thing, it sounded like two 
ferrets fighting infront of a de-tuned radio.

Whatever system the wiki and the forums have we better make it sure it 
is the right one because there would be nothing worse than going to a 
site and finding you can't use it because of a rubbish captcha system.

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[George Prowse]

On 10/04/2010 05:10, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 01:19:32AM +0200, Ben de Groot wrote:
>> On 3 April 2010 20:56, George Prowse<george.prowse@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> Does mediawiki have captcha ability?
>>
>> Yes, there are a number of solutions for that.
>
>   I realize I am very late on this thread, but please do not go here
>   unless you provide an audio solution as well.  Otherwise, you will
>   affectively lock blind users out of the wiki, just as they are
>   currentlylocked out of the forums.
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/284362
>
> Thanks,
>
while we are on the subject, can tomk or whoever is the head forums 
techie these days fix up an accessibility suitable system for the 
forums? It has been six months since that bug was opened.

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 10-04-2010 13:35, George Prowse wrote:
> On 10/04/2010 05:10, William Hubbs wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 01:19:32AM +0200, Ben de Groot wrote:
>>> On 3 April 2010 20:56, George Prowse<george.prowse@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>> Does mediawiki have captcha ability?
>>>
>>> Yes, there are a number of solutions for that.
>>
>>   I realize I am very late on this thread, but please do not go here
>>   unless you provide an audio solution as well.  Otherwise, you will
>>   affectively lock blind users out of the wiki, just as they are
>>   currentlylocked out of the forums.
>> http://bugs.gentoo.org/284362
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
> while we are on the subject, can tomk or whoever is the head forums
> techie these days fix up an accessibility suitable system for the
> forums? It has been six months since that bug was opened.

William / George,

the forums team is aware of the bug and even though we realize its
importance and do not wish to discriminate, the fact is that we do not
have the resources to fix this bug when we're still working on the
migration to phpBB3 and reviewing the infrastructure for the forums.
Any help fixing this bug is obviously most welcome.

- -- 
Regards,

Jorge Vicetto (jmbsvicetto) - jmbsvicetto at gentoo dot org
Gentoo- forums / Userrel / Devrel / KDE / Elections
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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Guy Fontaine]

Hi !

I maintain Gentoo-Québec wiki. I'm not the only one as d2_racing and some other members also do. I maintain CSS, examples and wrote almost 60% of the stuff.

If you think I could help, please just let me know. 

The wiki :

http://gentoo-quebec.org/wiki/index.php/Accueil

Guy Fontaine

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 3 April 2010 16:04, Guy Fontaine <guy.fontaine@videotron.qc.ca> wrote:
> I maintain Gentoo-Québec wiki. I'm not the only one as d2_racing and some other members also do. I maintain CSS, examples and wrote almost 60% of the stuff.
>
> If you think I could help, please just let me know.

I think you can help. Stay in touch!

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

RE: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Sylvain Alain]

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Hi everyone, Gentoo-Quebec already use MediaWiki and I can say that for the spam prevention measures it can be pretty simple :

For a new user, he needs to
send an email to a specific adress, alos he needs to have a valid
account on the forum just to be sure that he is not a spambot. So basically, only members of the forum can write something on the wiki.

For the rest, if you need a moderator or a writer on that project, I can help :P

Finally, I recommend that on the Wiki team, the best team should be : experimented users (power users), users,moderators and Gentoo Devs for specific areas. 


> Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2010 10:04:38 -0400
> From: guy.fontaine@videotron.qc.ca
> To: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki
> 
> Hi !
> 
> I maintain Gentoo-Québec wiki. I'm not the only one as d2_racing and some other members also do. I maintain CSS, examples and wrote almost 60% of the stuff.
> 
> If you think I could help, please just let me know. 
> 
> The wiki :
> 
> http://gentoo-quebec.org/wiki/index.php/Accueil
> 
> Guy Fontaine
> 
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail & Messenger are available on your phone. Try now.
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9724461

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Alex Legler]

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On Sat, 3 Apr 2010 15:19:20 +0200, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org>
wrote:

> 1 - requirements
> ================
> 
> In order to choose the best possible wiki implementation, we need to
> know our requirements. So what features do you think are essential or
> good to have? What syntax would we prefer to use?
> 
> [...]
> 
> - active upstream (bug fixes, security updates)
> - free open source software
> - ACLs
> - spam prevention measures
> - attachments (to upload screenshots for example)
> - feeds
> 

I propose to use MediaWiki.

It fulfills all of your points above. Plus the software is proven in
large scale deployments and the security track record is alright.

> 
> 
> 2 - maintainers
> ===============
> 
> Who is volunteering for maintaining the wiki? We need editors and
> moderators, people who look out for quality control and take care of
> spam removal. So let's get together a team. I'm sure if we ask on the
> forums we'll get some users interested as well.

I'd be interested in helping out with the backend part, i.e. setting up
and maintaining the Wiki software and the needed extensions,
user management and support.

> 
> 
> 3 - edit access
> ===============
> 
> Do we keep to the original "free for all" model, with all the spam
> that includes, or do we go with registered users only? I think the
> latter is the smarter option. I also think we will want to mark
> certain pages "official" and lock down editing rights.
> 

Here's another idea:
The German Wikipedia uses a concept called "sighted revisions". If you
visit an article without logging in you will see the latest sighted
revision, as an identified user you can also view the latest revision.

For the editing part:
Some users have the privilege to mark revisions as "sighted". In
Wikipedia, you gain that privilege automatically after 300 or so edits.
We could of course set that bit manually or use another threshold.

If a "regular" user makes a contribution, one of the editors would go
and check the changes and mark the revision as sighted.

> 
> Is there anything else we should consider before getting started?
> 

Maybe we should discuss what goals we want to reach with a Wiki.

One thing is offering user-contributed documentation, of course.
But do we also want a developer wiki? Or offer per-project realms in our
wiki? Or $something_else?

Alex

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 3 April 2010 16:30, Alex Legler <a3li@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I propose to use MediaWiki.

As I said in my other post, MediaWiki and MoinMoin should, in my
opinion, be on our shortlist to consider.

> I'd be interested in helping out with the backend part, i.e. setting up
> and maintaining the Wiki software and the needed extensions,
> user management and support.

Thanks, that would certainly be helpful.

> Here's another idea:
> The German Wikipedia uses a concept called "sighted revisions". If you
> visit an article without logging in you will see the latest sighted
> revision, as an identified user you can also view the latest revision.

That's an interesting idea, which we should consider.


>> Is there anything else we should consider before getting started?
>>
>
> Maybe we should discuss what goals we want to reach with a Wiki.
>
> One thing is offering user-contributed documentation, of course.
> But do we also want a developer wiki? Or offer per-project realms in our
> wiki? Or $something_else?

Good suggestion. I think we would want to accommodate both
user-contributed documentation and developer needs. For example,
recently the need arose to have a wiki page for GSoC ideas.
Projects may want to use it as well. I find myself using the wiki
at gitorious.org (where we also host our overlay) for purposes of
the Qt herd. It would also be handy for developing new documentation
(it would have helped for the LXDE guide, or the Qt4 ebuild
development howto) as well as keeping existing documentation up to
date. GuideXML documents are often experienced as an unnecessary
barrier.

What else do we want it for and how would that impact organization?

-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Sebastian Pipping]

On 04/03/10 16:46, Ben de Groot wrote:
>> I propose to use MediaWiki.
> 
> As I said in my other post, MediaWiki and MoinMoin should, in my
> opinion, be on our shortlist to consider.

My vote on MediaWiki, too.

(I do like DokuWiki better for personal things but mediaWiki seems the
best choice for a project this large.)

Btw was it Fedora having moved from MoinMoin to MediaWiki?
I remember something like that, could be erring though.


>> Here's another idea:
>> The German Wikipedia uses a concept called "sighted revisions". If you
>> visit an article without logging in you will see the latest sighted
>> revision, as an identified user you can also view the latest revision.
> 
> That's an interesting idea, which we should consider.

I'm not sure if that a thing to go for.  Drawbacks:
- More work  (whereas we could use more manpower already)
- New bottlenecks

Couldn't we just make two big "namespaces"

  'devs'        -- Developers only
  'registered'  -- Full edit access to any registered user

in the same wiki and have pages be in either namespace, reflecting the
namespace in the page name or path somehow?

I expect that to be
- easy to implement
- providing a good mix of openness and quality control


> GuideXML documents are often experienced as an unnecessary
> barrier.

I think you should clearly state again that this is not gonna replace
GuideXML, just migrate a few use cases where a wiki fits better.
This is what you aim for, right?



Sebastian

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 4 April 2010 01:37, Sebastian Pipping <sping@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Btw was it Fedora having moved from MoinMoin to MediaWiki?
> I remember something like that, could be erring though.

You are right. Here are some relevant links a quick Google search
turned up for me:

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/31
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/WikiRequirements
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2008-February/msg00085.html

It looks like their main concerns were performance, both in terms of
scalability and search (the default internal MoinMoin search engine
is notoriously slow). Makes you wonder how Ubuntu manage to use
MoinMoin apparently succesfully.

The conclusion (in my eyes) is that MediaWiki is likely to be the
best choice and easiest to set up for our purposes. Unless someone
comes with another proposal and good arguments to go with something
else, I'd say we should stick to MediaWiki.


>>> Here's another idea:
>>> The German Wikipedia uses a concept called "sighted revisions". If you
>>> visit an article without logging in you will see the latest sighted
>>> revision, as an identified user you can also view the latest revision.
>>
>> That's an interesting idea, which we should consider.
>
> I'm not sure if that a thing to go for.  Drawbacks:
> - More work  (whereas we could use more manpower already)
> - New bottlenecks
>
> Couldn't we just make two big "namespaces"
>
>  'devs'        -- Developers only
>  'registered'  -- Full edit access to any registered user
>
> in the same wiki and have pages be in either namespace, reflecting the
> namespace in the page name or path somehow?
>
> I expect that to be
> - easy to implement
> - providing a good mix of openness and quality control

Actually this came up in earlier discussions as well, and there was
an in my opinion valid concern about the status and quality of user
generated documentation, especially if we open it to the wider public
as we are proposing here. I think it would be a good thing to give
certain revisions of a certain page an offical "stamp of approval".
It would probably be educational to see how other distros handle
that. Does anyone want to volunteer to find that out?

>> GuideXML documents are often experienced as an unnecessary
>> barrier.
>
> I think you should clearly state again that this is not gonna replace
> GuideXML, just migrate a few use cases where a wiki fits better.
> This is what you aim for, right?

A wiki can fulfill several purposes for us:

1. Easy collaboration among devs, for brainstorming, developing new
   documentation, assembling upcoming meeting agendas, and so on
   [for which there currently is not really any obvious place]
2. A place for users to collaborate on and contribute to documentation
   [which is currently covered by the unofficial wiki]
3. A place to host and maintain our existing documentation
   [which is currently in GuideXML]

For me the most important and immediate need is number 1. This is the
need that came up several times recently, and the push for me to try
to make this happen.

I am not pushing for our existing documentation to be migrated into a
wiki at this point. But I think that once the place is there, and it
functions well, it would be the obvious next step to do so. As I said
before, the barrier to contributing and maintaining documentation is
much higher in the case of GuideXML, so it doesn't really make sense
to keep that around when we have a better solution.

I know there are people who do not agree with me on this last point,
which is why I see that as a later and separate goal. We can cross
that bridge when we come to it.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Joshua Saddler]

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On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 03:20:53 +0200
Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >> GuideXML documents are often experienced as an unnecessary
> >> barrier.
> >
> > I think you should clearly state again that this is not gonna replace
> > GuideXML, just migrate a few use cases where a wiki fits better.
> > This is what you aim for, right?

No, he's definitely out to kill GuideXML. Just give him time.

> A wiki can fulfill several purposes for us:
> 
> 1. Easy collaboration among devs, for brainstorming, developing new
>    documentation, assembling upcoming meeting agendas, and so on
>    [for which there currently is not really any obvious place]

This is not *impossible* with our current setup; it can still be done in a few different ways:

1) project spaces in /proj/$LANG/foobar/ -- how hard is it to commit to CVS when going through document drafts?
2) devspaces -- it's easy enough to dump stuff in here for others to refer to

However, a wiki *does* make it easier for everyone to jump right in and edit stuff as ideas are passed around, rather than waiting for someone to make changes to something in a devspace.

> 3. A place to host and maintain our existing documentation
>    [which is currently in GuideXML]

Entirely unnecessary duplication of effort. To quote the forum mods, "don't cross-post" . . . and especially don't do it if you'll be violating a doc license somewhere. It's one of the reasons why we don't use existing unofficial wiki content in our docs. I and the GDP have written about that ad nauseum over the years; just search the list archives.
 
> I am not pushing for our existing documentation to be migrated into a
> wiki at this point. But I think that once the place is there, and it
> functions well, it would be the obvious next step to do so. As I said
> before, the barrier to contributing and maintaining documentation is
> much higher in the case of GuideXML, so it doesn't really make sense
> to keep that around when we have a better solution.
> 
> I know there are people who do not agree with me on this last point

. . . to say the least.

Show me a wiki that has the flexibility of our handbook, which can be a huge printer-friendly all-in-one doc, or an as-you-need-it doc with one page per chapter.

Show me a wiki that has built-in intradoc linking to every paragraph, chapter, subchapter, code sample, etc.

Show me a wiki that produces such beautiful code samples (with titles). Show me a wiki that can produce the following formatting for ebuilds:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap2_sect7

. . . or a wiki that makes it super-easy to add all sorts of additional in-line formatting to regular paragraphs, for example all the blue highlighting for code used throughout http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml, or the monospace font used for filesystem paths.

Show me a wiki that makes it easy to create tables, for example, compare RadeonProgram from the x.org wiki:

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonProgram?action=edit

||<-2 style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''Native''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R100''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R200''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R300''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R400''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''RS690''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R500''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R600''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R700''' ||


. . . that's one line of cells. One. Ugly. Compare it to:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap5_pre1

<table>
<tr>
  <th>Foo</th>
  <th>Bar</th>
</tr>
<tr>
  <ti>This is an example for indentation</ti>
  <ti>more stuff</ti>
</tr>
</table>

Which is easier to read and instantly comprehend?

By moving to a wiki, you'll lose a huge percentage of what GuideXML can do, in exchange for "quicker" and "easier" editing and creation of docs, though neither of these have been qualified. As some others on this list have mentioned, wiki syntax is downright ugly and simply not as consistent or readable as plain ol' XML or HTML.

From what I've seen, the biggest objection to GuideXML is folks don't want to take the time to learn a few tags. Well, you'll have to learn tags and syntax for either system, so pick your poison. I've yet to see a wiki that even has as much sense as HTML, which is pretty low on the totem pole of consistency.

I ain't out to stop ya'll from using a wiki. I do agree that they have some advantages. However, I will point out how limited wikis are. They're not a magic bullet that will solve all our problems.

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Arun Raghavan]

On 4 April 2010 13:01, Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
[...]
>> I am not pushing for our existing documentation to be migrated into a
>> wiki at this point. But I think that once the place is there, and it
>> functions well, it would be the obvious next step to do so. As I said
>> before, the barrier to contributing and maintaining documentation is
>> much higher in the case of GuideXML, so it doesn't really make sense
>> to keep that around when we have a better solution.
>>
>> I know there are people who do not agree with me on this last point
[... lots of good reasons to keep the documentation in GuideXML ...]

I think the docs team has put in a huge amount of effort for a long
time now to make well-formatted, easily readable documentation, and
there really isn't a wiki solution out there that is remotely
comparable.

GuideXML isn't that hard to pick up, and I'm sure the docs team would
be happy to help someone who's having trouble figuring out how to do
something with it. So I *really* don't see "ease-of-use" being a good
excuse for replacing GuideXML with a wiki. The difference in ease is
not that high.

[...]
> I ain't out to stop ya'll from using a wiki. I do agree that they have some advantages. However, I will point out how limited wikis are. They're not a magic bullet that will solve all our problems.

Again, I agree. We _should_ have a wiki for easy note-taking,
maintaining todo lists, possibly even meeting minutes. But our
official documentation should go through sufficient review and
formatting to make sure we maintain the quality of documentation that
we have had so far.

Cheers,
-- 
Arun Raghavan
http://arunraghavan.net/
(Ford_Prefect | Gentoo) & (arunsr | GNOME)

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Sebastian Pipping]

On 04/04/10 10:29, Arun Raghavan wrote:
> We _should_ have a wiki for easy note-taking,
> maintaining todo lists, possibly even meeting minutes. But our
> official documentation should go through sufficient review and
> formatting to make sure we maintain the quality of documentation that
> we have had so far.

I suppose this^^^ is both a good solution and compromise,
both to wiki-fans and the doc team.

Ben, could you live with that?
Anyone else having stomach aches with this?



Sebastian

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 4 April 2010 10:47, Sebastian Pipping <sping@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 04/04/10 10:29, Arun Raghavan wrote:
>> We _should_ have a wiki for easy note-taking,
>> maintaining todo lists, possibly even meeting minutes
>
> I suppose this^^^ is both a good solution and compromise,
> both to wiki-fans and the doc team.
>
> Ben, could you live with that?

As I said, the most important thing for me is to have a wiki that
will allow developers to quickly whip up pages like Arun is
describing here. For example the GSoC ideas page.

If that is all we ever do with it, then it is worth having, and I can
certainly live with that. This specific need is why I'm making the
effort now to get this done.

But I am not hiding the fact that I would also like it to serve a
wider purpose. But that is a separate discussion. We want the wiki
anyway, independently from whether the GDP wants to use it or not.
At this point they don't, so GDP-maintained documentation is not
included in the scope of the wiki. I do hope that will change in the
future. But I can live with it if it doesn't.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Antoni Grzymala]

Joshua Saddler dixit (2010-04-04, 00:31):

> Show me a wiki that has the flexibility of our handbook, which can be
> a huge printer-friendly all-in-one doc, or an as-you-need-it doc with
> one page per chapter.
> 
> Show me a wiki that has built-in intradoc linking to every paragraph,
> chapter, subchapter, code sample, etc.
> 
> Show me a wiki that produces such beautiful code samples (with
> titles). Show me a wiki that can produce the following formatting for
> ebuilds:
> 
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap2_sect7
> 
> . . . or a wiki that makes it super-easy to add all sorts of
> additional in-line formatting to regular paragraphs, for example all
> the blue highlighting for code used throughout
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml, or the monospace font used
> for filesystem paths.

[...]

Has anyone considered the immensely powerful twiki?

-- 
[a]

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Sebastian Pipping]

On 04/04/10 10:48, Antoni Grzymala wrote:
> Has anyone considered the immensely powerful twiki?

if the wikis i have worked with twiki was the least
fun.  it feels "strange" and it's native syntax sucks
big time, to say the least.



sebastian

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Alex Legler]

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On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 10:48:52 +0200, Antoni Grzymala
<awaria@chopin.edu.pl> wrote:

> 
> Has anyone considered the immensely powerful twiki?
> 

The Webs concept of TWiki is interesting and the table editing nifty,
but we would need to assess if it matches our goals. I somehow fear that
it outreaches our aims a bit.

-- 
Alex Legler | Gentoo Security / Ruby
a3li@gentoo.org | a3li@jabber.ccc.de

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 4 April 2010 10:48, Antoni Grzymala <awaria@chopin.edu.pl> wrote:
>
> Has anyone considered the immensely powerful twiki?

No. So tell us why we should. Specifically, how does it compare to
MediaWiki in terms of features and performance?

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Antoni Grzymala]

Ben de Groot dixit (2010-04-04, 14:31):

> On 4 April 2010 10:48, Antoni Grzymala <awaria@chopin.edu.pl> wrote:
> >
> > Has anyone considered the immensely powerful twiki?
> 
> No. So tell us why we should. Specifically, how does it compare to
> MediaWiki in terms of features and performance?

I don't have any particular claims on performance at hand. TWiki stores
the data in plaintext files which may or may not be beneficial depending
on various scenarios, the code is very mature but that of course does
not say anything on whether the performance is good or not compared to,
say, MediaWiki. Here [1] is a reasonably recent writeup on TWiki's
performance.

As to the features, I (contrary to sebastian in an earlier answer) quite
like the syntax, I think it's a bit more comfortable the MediaWiki in
popular scenarios.

There's a good ACL system, it's got an integrated ticket system, a
mobile-version plugin, and I too think the whole concept of Webs is
neat. The search system is extensive and includes regex searching.

And yeah, it's not PHP :) (no flame intended™)

[1] http://www.twiki.net/blog_2008-03-25.html

-- 
[a]

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Alex Legler]

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On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 00:31:52 -0700, Joshua Saddler
<nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:

> 
> No, he's definitely out to kill GuideXML. Just give him time.
> 

At least for official documentation, that should not happen.

(That excludes non-doc parts of the website though imo. GuideXML is a
XML "DSL" designed for documentation, sadly it sucks for doing
websites.)

> > A wiki can fulfill several purposes for us:
> > 
> [...]
> 
> However, a wiki *does* make it easier for everyone to jump right in
> and edit stuff as ideas are passed around, rather than waiting for
> someone to make changes to something in a devspace.
> 

That's why we should want a wiki for general collaboration.

> > 3. A place to host and maintain our existing documentation
> >    [which is currently in GuideXML]
> 
> Entirely unnecessary duplication of effort. To quote the forum mods,
> "don't cross-post" . . . and especially don't do it if you'll be
> violating a doc license somewhere. It's one of the reasons why we
> don't use existing unofficial wiki content in our docs. I and the GDP
> have written about that ad nauseum over the years; just search the
> list archives. 

ack. It should /not/ be a goal of the Wiki to maintain official docs.

> [...]
> Show me a wiki that produces such beautiful code samples (with
> titles). 
> [...]
> . . . or a wiki that makes it super-easy to add all sorts of
> additional in-line formatting to regular paragraphs, for example all
> the blue highlighting for code used throughout
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml, or the monospace font
> used for filesystem paths.
> 

Let's be honest: Such things can be arranged. Most Wikis have a {{foo}}
-> <tt>foo</tt> syntax already built in.

> Show me a wiki that makes it easy to create tables, for example,
> compare RadeonProgram from the x.org wiki:
> 
> http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonProgram?action=edit
> 
> ||<-2 style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666">
> '''Native''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color:
> #666666"> '''R100''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color:
> #666666"> '''R200''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color:
> #666666"> '''R300''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color:
> #666666"> '''R400''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color:
> #666666"> '''RS690''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color:
> #666666"> '''R500''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color:
> #666666"> '''R600''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color:
> #666666"> '''R700''' ||
> 
> 
> . . . that's one line of cells. One. Ugly. Compare it to:
> 
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap5_pre1
> 
> <table>
> <tr>
>   <th>Foo</th>
>   <th>Bar</th>
> </tr>
> <tr>
>   <ti>This is an example for indentation</ti>
>   <ti>more stuff</ti>
> </tr>
> </table>
> 

Meep. That's an unfair one.
The guidexml snippet does not contain any styling. (Oh wait, I forgot,
it doesn't even support styling. [another reason why it sucks for
websites])

> [...]
> 
> I ain't out to stop ya'll from using a wiki. I do agree that they
> have some advantages. However, I will point out how limited wikis
> are. They're not a magic bullet that will solve all our problems.

Again: Official docs should not be considered as Wiki material indeed.
Of course if someone feels like experimenting with such things in the
Wiki, feel free to. If the experiment should be really successful, the
GDP might reconsider.
But it's still the GDP's sandbox and as long as they're playing in it,
don't take away their toys.

Let's work *together* towards a better Gentoo, so let's consider the
official docs off-limits for the Wiki effort (at least for now) as
there are valid reasons against such a thing.

Alex

-- 
Alex Legler | Gentoo Security / Ruby
a3li@gentoo.org | a3li@jabber.ccc.de

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[AllenJB]

On 04/04/10 08:31, Joshua Saddler wrote:
> <lots of stuff about what mediawiki supposedly can't do that is just completely untrue>

GuideXML may be better for the Handbook use case, with its ability to
produce single page and multipage documents, but frankly I think that
for the rest of the documentation, most of which only covers 1 or 2
pages, the ease of learning and editing mediawiki formats is far
superior. (I wouldn't be surprised if there's a way to reproduce this
single-page and multipage ability using inclusion on mediawiki)

I keep hearing this line about GuideXML not being hard to learn, but if
that's so true, why does Gentoo have so few developers contributing to
the documentation? Why does the current system basically rely on a
single developer tidying up and completing the documentation?

I've tried getting my head around GuideXML a few times and I hate
dealing with it. I much prefer to use the Gentoo Wiki, where I can just
throw stuff up really quickly using a syntax I use in many other places
and is well documented.

This line about learning wiki syntax is so old, but here's my reply yet
again: GuideXML is a non-tranferrable skill. Nowhere else in the entire
world uses it. Even if you haven't edited a wiki anywhere else, chances
are you probably will one day, and even if it's not mediawiki it'll
probably use syntax that's similar to it in many ways.

Syntax highlighting can easily be done with any of a number of plugins.
I'm sure ebuild syntax could be added without a massive amount of pain.

There are multiple ways to construct tables (wiki style, HTML and
probably some others - almost certainly more available via plugins),
some easier than others. And you can do styling either inline or in the
site-wide stylesheets.

Mediawiki has built-in intradoc linking to every heading, and in all the
use cases I've seen this level is fine. Intradoc linking to individual
letters^Wparas is just frankly way overboard (Does the Gentoo
documentation even use it anywhere?).

Wiki's may not be a magic bullet that'll solve all of Gentoo's problems,
but the current system doesn't seem to be working well, so something
needs to change, and I believe that a system that allows more people to
contribute more easily, using a syntax that's already widely used so is
either already known or an easily transferable skill is not a bad place
to start.

AllenJB

RE: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Sylvain Alain]

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> Show me a wiki that produces such beautiful code samples (with titles). Show me a wiki that can produce the following formatting for ebuilds:
> 
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap2_sect7
> 
> . . . or a wiki that makes it super-easy to add all sorts of additional in-line formatting to regular paragraphs, for example all the blue highlighting for code used throughout http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml, or the monospace font used for filesystem paths.
> 
> Show me a wiki that makes it easy to create tables, for example, compare RadeonProgram from the x.org wiki:
> 
> http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonProgram?action=edit
> 
> ||<-2 style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''Native''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R100''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R200''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R300''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R400''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''RS690''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R500''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R600''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666"> '''R700''' ||
> 
> 
> . . . that's one line of cells. One. Ugly. Compare it to:
> 
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap5_pre1

For the record, mediawiki support CSS with the utilization of wiki modeles, so you can do almost anything that you want :

http://gentoo-quebec.org/wiki/index.php/Guide_installation_configuration_syst%C3%A8me_de_base

Tables, code box etc...

My friend Guy coded a lot of wiki modeles and I can almost do anything I want if he coded what I wanted.
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Live connected. Get Hotmail & Messenger on your phone.
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9724462

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Dror Levin]

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 10:31, Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
> No, he's definitely out to kill GuideXML. Just give him time.
Why the antagonism? Ben isn't out to kill anything, he has no personal
vendetta against anything. Actually, nothing here is personal, but you
seem offended by some of the things which are being said, and you
really shouldn't.

>> A wiki can fulfill several purposes for us:
>>
>> 1. Easy collaboration among devs, for brainstorming, developing new
>>    documentation, assembling upcoming meeting agendas, and so on
>>    [for which there currently is not really any obvious place]
>
> This is not *impossible* with our current setup; it can still be done in a few different ways:
>
> 1) project spaces in /proj/$LANG/foobar/ -- how hard is it to commit to CVS when going through document drafts?
> 2) devspaces -- it's easy enough to dump stuff in here for others to refer to
>
> However, a wiki *does* make it easier for everyone to jump right in and edit stuff as ideas are passed around, rather than waiting for someone to make changes to something in a devspace.
That's exactly what we're looking for. That's what makes a wiki useful
in the first place.

>> 3. A place to host and maintain our existing documentation
>>    [which is currently in GuideXML]
>
> Entirely unnecessary duplication of effort. To quote the forum mods, "don't cross-post" . . . and especially don't do it if you'll be violating a doc license somewhere. It's one of the reasons why we don't use existing unofficial wiki content in our docs. I and the GDP have written about that ad nauseum over the years; just search the list archives.
>
>> I am not pushing for our existing documentation to be migrated into a
>> wiki at this point. But I think that once the place is there, and it
>> functions well, it would be the obvious next step to do so. As I said
>> before, the barrier to contributing and maintaining documentation is
>> much higher in the case of GuideXML, so it doesn't really make sense
>> to keep that around when we have a better solution.
>>
>> I know there are people who do not agree with me on this last point
>
> . . . to say the least.
>
> [snip]
>
> I ain't out to stop ya'll from using a wiki. I do agree that they have some advantages. However, I will point out how limited wikis are. They're not a magic bullet that will solve all our problems.
Why would you want to stop us? Have you been to gentoo-wiki.com? There
are a lot of *very* useful articles there. With all due respect to the
doc team (and I have tremendous respect for them and the splendid
documentation they have written for Gentoo), they're limited by
manpower, by time, and by scope. They simply can't cover all the
things that are interesting and useful for our users. Some examples
which can never be covered by the official documentation:
1. Most of the stuff that's on the Documentation, Tips & Tricks forum.
And all the stuff that's already there can not be updated or changed,
and cannot even be found easily, so it's just rotting there.
2. All hardware specific information that's extremely useful to users
(information for Macs, all kinds of laptops, netbooks, how to update
your BIOS, etc.)
3. HOWTO's and guides for *a lot* of the software on the tree (many
kinds of mail servers available, HTTP servers, databases, spam
filters, alternative init systems, boot loaders, experimental drivers,
etc.). Some of those are covered by official documentation, by it can
never cover it all.

And I could go on (please do not argue about a specific point where I
may not be accurate, that's not the point). Our users want this kind
of information available, they want to share the information they
learned, they want to improve guides written by other people, build
upon work done by others. Gentoo can earn so much from a system that
will allow this. Our users want to help us and each other, let's help
them to that.
Furthermore, when an article on the wiki reaches maturity, it can be
included in our official documentation. Stuff can move around between
official documentation and wiki. Out of date official documentation
can be moved to the wiki where it can be improved instead of rotting.
Both can coexist and feed each other, providing more answers overall.

A wiki is not a new concept. Users know what they're getting from a
wiki. They know it's not official, know it was written by other users,
know that not all information is necessarily accurate, up-to-date or
relevant. But you can't ignore how useful a wiki is, what new heights
we can reach with it.

At first, I'd wish for things to be migrated from the unofficial wiki
(if the license does not allow for copying, then re-writing it. Our
users will do a lot of it, I'm sure). I'd wish to migrate a lot of
things from the forums, after getting the authors permission if
necessary. Maybe at some point I'd like the devmanual to be moved to
the wiki (probably only editable by devs or a certain team, the
specifics are not important right now). The quizzes can be put on the
wiki. GLEP summaries in language users understand. Drafts for news
items. The list goes on and on.

Dror Levin

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[AllenJB]

On 04/04/10 15:15, Dror Levin wrote:
> At first, I'd wish for things to be migrated from the unofficial wiki
> (if the license does not allow for copying, then re-writing it. Our
> users will do a lot of it, I'm sure). I'd wish to migrate a lot of
> things from the forums, after getting the authors permission if
> necessary. Maybe at some point I'd like the devmanual to be moved to
> the wiki (probably only editable by devs or a certain team, the
> specifics are not important right now). The quizzes can be put on the
> wiki. GLEP summaries in language users understand. Drafts for news
> items. The list goes on and on.
> 
> Dror Levin
> 
I'd like to ask what you think in launching a site that simply clones an
existing site is? Why take all the hard work the editors have put into
their articles on the unofficial wiki and duplicate them on another
site, creating TWO copies, both of which may be updated with different
information.

This is completely pointless.

And as someone who has contributed a lot to the existing wiki, I don't
care if it's official or not, but any site I find copying articles I've
contributed to (and certainly the ones I wrote from scratch) will suffer
all the wrath and abuse I can bring to it.

An official wiki should not be used to duplicate the existing unofficial
wiki (and I don't believe this is the intent of the developers who want
one). It should be used to provide additional documentation on top of
that provided by the existing wiki.

AllenJB

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Dror Levin]

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 17:33, AllenJB <gentoo-lists@allenjb.me.uk> wrote:
> I'd like to ask what you think in launching a site that simply clones an
> existing site is? Why take all the hard work the editors have put into
> their articles on the unofficial wiki and duplicate them on another
> site, creating TWO copies, both of which may be updated with different
> information.
>
> This is completely pointless.
>
> And as someone who has contributed a lot to the existing wiki, I don't
> care if it's official or not, but any site I find copying articles I've
> contributed to (and certainly the ones I wrote from scratch) will suffer
> all the wrath and abuse I can bring to it.
That's a shame, but as I said, if the license permits it then we'll
move the content, if it doesn't then we won't.

> An official wiki should not be used to duplicate the existing unofficial
> wiki (and I don't believe this is the intent of the developers who want
> one). It should be used to provide additional documentation on top of
> that provided by the existing wiki.

Creating just another wiki is what's pointless. What I want is to
deprecate all unofficial wikis (there are others besides
gentoo-wiki.com) which were created simply because there never was an
official one and creating chaos, then centralize everything in one
official wiki, and build on top of that. Fix the historic mistake.
Concentrating information from the forums and various wikis is just
the first step.
This should be the goal of all of us, yours as well. Who wants to run
around all over the internet trying to find relevant information on
various forums, wikis, blogs, etc. when an official wiki can remedy a
big part of that, making it easier to find what you're searching for.
Instead of being scattered around, we want everything in one place,
that's how it can be made even better.

Dror Levin

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[AllenJB]

On 04/04/10 15:47, Dror Levin wrote:
> Creating just another wiki is what's pointless. What I want is to
> deprecate all unofficial wikis (there are others besides
> gentoo-wiki.com) which were created simply because there never was an
> official one and creating chaos, then centralize everything in one
> official wiki, and build on top of that. Fix the historic mistake.
> Concentrating information from the forums and various wikis is just
> the first step.
> This should be the goal of all of us, yours as well. Who wants to run
> around all over the internet trying to find relevant information on
> various forums, wikis, blogs, etc. when an official wiki can remedy a
> big part of that, making it easier to find what you're searching for.
> Instead of being scattered around, we want everything in one place,
> that's how it can be made even better.
> 
> Dror Levin
> 
The unofficial wiki may have been created because there wasn't an
official one, but that doesn't mean it's any less of a community in its
own right.

Starting the official wiki by effectively ripping off others work and
attempting to destroy existing user communities is NOT the right way to
go about things, in my opinion (and losing the editing history of those
articles in the process).

You should first try to start your wiki/community and make it a
community in its own right, rather than trying to steal/destroy/rip off
existing communities.

My personal goal is to continue to maintain an existing community full
of useful documentation, already concentrated in one place. The
unofficial wiki avoids duplication by pointing to existing documentation
where ever possible.

The search problem is already dealt with by Google, so that's no reason
to go about ripping off other peoples work.

With your aims in mind, I don't see the point in duplicating existing
material, creating TWO places you have to check to see what's been updated.

If an "official wiki" starts up and becomes a major documentation centre
for user contributions, then I may consider moving my articles over, but
until that time I currently intend to maintain them in place, with their
complete history in tact.

AllenJB

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[dev-random]

Hm. Can you all just talk to the admin of gentoo-wiki and make it official?

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 4 April 2010 17:36,  <dev-random@mail.ru> wrote:
> Hm. Can you all just talk to the admin of gentoo-wiki and make it official?

Been there, done that. He's not interested.

-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 4 April 2010 17:13, AllenJB <gentoo-lists@allenjb.me.uk> wrote:
> The unofficial wiki may have been created because there wasn't an
> official one, but that doesn't mean it's any less of a community in its
> own right.

And that doesn't mean that community wouldn't be interested to work
on a new, official wiki that concentrates efforts into one place,
under the umbrella of the wider Gentoo community.

> Starting the official wiki by effectively ripping off others work and
> attempting to destroy existing user communities is NOT the right way to
> go about things

Nobody is talking about ripping off and destroying, but you. There is
no need for such dramatic language.

> If an "official wiki" starts up and becomes a major documentation centre
> for user contributions,

That is the intent, and we hope you will work with us to make that
happen.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Zeerak Mustafa Waseem]

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On Sun, Apr 04, 2010 at 04:13:19PM +0100, AllenJB wrote:
> The unofficial wiki may have been created because there wasn't an
> official one, but that doesn't mean it's any less of a community in its
> own right.
> 
> Starting the official wiki by effectively ripping off others work and
> attempting to destroy existing user communities is NOT the right way to
> go about things, in my opinion (and losing the editing history of those
> articles in the process).
> 
> You should first try to start your wiki/community and make it a
> community in its own right, rather than trying to steal/destroy/rip off
> existing communities.
> 
> My personal goal is to continue to maintain an existing community full
> of useful documentation, already concentrated in one place. The
> unofficial wiki avoids duplication by pointing to existing documentation
> where ever possible.
> 
> The search problem is already dealt with by Google, so that's no reason
> to go about ripping off other peoples work.
> 
> With your aims in mind, I don't see the point in duplicating existing
> material, creating TWO places you have to check to see what's been updated.
> 
> If an "official wiki" starts up and becomes a major documentation centre
> for user contributions, then I may consider moving my articles over, but
> until that time I currently intend to maintain them in place, with their
> complete history in tact.
> 
> AllenJB
> 

You're absolutely right, it is a seperate community, and reading your replies I can't help but think "Is the url really that important?". After all regardless of where the articles that you've written, you still would be the writer. You could still take part in the various discussions that may arise on the articles.

The way I see it is that when the official wiki comes up, it will only be a question of time before the pages covered in the unofficial wiki are covered in the official one, particularly if it'll be mainly user-driven and people stop thinking about using the unofficial wiki, as there is a wiki and the answer isn't there. So when they find the answer, they add it.
Personally I'd prefer to be part of the change rather than resisting it.
I can understand reluctance to join a project you aren't certain will succeed, though.

As another note, the license of gentoo-wiki doesn't stop anyone from copying but is incompatible with the license on the docs (was mentioned in a thread recently) so what is in gentoo-wiki won't be copied, but at best/worst rewritten. 

As an endnote, none of the above is meant as provocative or offensive, so in case it does offend; you have my apologies (it seems like a touchy subject for you so I thought I'd make it clear :-) )

-- 
Zeerak Waseem

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[AllenJB]

On 04/04/10 23:45, Zeerak Mustafa Waseem wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 04, 2010 at 04:13:19PM +0100, AllenJB wrote:
>> The unofficial wiki may have been created because there wasn't an
>> official one, but that doesn't mean it's any less of a community in its
>> own right.
>>
>> Starting the official wiki by effectively ripping off others work and
>> attempting to destroy existing user communities is NOT the right way to
>> go about things, in my opinion (and losing the editing history of those
>> articles in the process).
>>
>> You should first try to start your wiki/community and make it a
>> community in its own right, rather than trying to steal/destroy/rip off
>> existing communities.
>>
>> My personal goal is to continue to maintain an existing community full
>> of useful documentation, already concentrated in one place. The
>> unofficial wiki avoids duplication by pointing to existing documentation
>> where ever possible.
>>
>> The search problem is already dealt with by Google, so that's no reason
>> to go about ripping off other peoples work.
>>
>> With your aims in mind, I don't see the point in duplicating existing
>> material, creating TWO places you have to check to see what's been updated.
>>
>> If an "official wiki" starts up and becomes a major documentation centre
>> for user contributions, then I may consider moving my articles over, but
>> until that time I currently intend to maintain them in place, with their
>> complete history in tact.
>>
>> AllenJB
>>
> 
> You're absolutely right, it is a seperate community, and reading your replies I can't help but think "Is the url really that important?". After all regardless of where the articles that you've written, you still would be the writer. You could still take part in the various discussions that may arise on the articles.
> 
> The way I see it is that when the official wiki comes up, it will only be a question of time before the pages covered in the unofficial wiki are covered in the official one, particularly if it'll be mainly user-driven and people stop thinking about using the unofficial wiki, as there is a wiki and the answer isn't there. So when they find the answer, they add it.
> Personally I'd prefer to be part of the change rather than resisting it.
> I can understand reluctance to join a project you aren't certain will succeed, though.

The way I see it, the "official" wiki has to earn my respect as a
project. The unofficial wiki already has already been through this
process. It's no different whether I'm trying a new piece of software or
a new distro.

It's not the URL that bothers me. I will, as I have said, quite happily
move the articles I've written over, relicensing what I can if
necessary, if/when I believe that the community would benefit.

My problem is with the attitude of "let's start the official wiki by
taking the content of the unofficial wiki, regardless of the wishes of
the active contributors of those articles".

> As another note, the license of gentoo-wiki doesn't stop anyone from copying but is incompatible with the license on the docs (was mentioned in a thread recently) so what is in gentoo-wiki won't be copied, but at best/worst rewritten. 
> 
> As an endnote, none of the above is meant as provocative or offensive, so in case it does offend; you have my apologies (it seems like a touchy subject for you so I thought I'd make it clear :-) )

Yes, the license may allow you to do this, and legally you might be able
to do so under the license. But the legal license and ethics/morals
involved in such action are different things.

As I see it, the purpose of licensing my articles under an open license
is to allow them to be contributed to and read without issues in the
eventuality that the current wiki is lost for any reason (tho this is
highly unlikely to happen again in the forseeable future as I and others
now actively backup the content of the wiki, and the server maintainer
has much better full backups in place) or the event that I am "hit by a
bus".


If those who wish to run an official wiki can see no sensible starting
point other than copying the content of the unofficial wiki, then I
would bring into question what the point of an official wiki would be,
and why should the Gentoo developers psend time and resources on
duplicating the efforts of the community when there is a huge long list
of other things they could do that would provide services to the
community that are not already catered for.

AllenJB

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 5 April 2010 00:21, AllenJB <gentoo-lists@allenjb.me.uk> wrote:
> My problem is with the attitude of "let's start the official wiki by
> taking the content of the unofficial wiki, regardless of the wishes of
> the active contributors of those articles".
[...]
> If those who wish to run an official wiki can see no sensible starting
> point other than copying the content of the unofficial wiki, then I
> would bring into question what the point of an official wiki would be,

Your problem is based on a misconception, because you're latching on
to a couple of remarks made in the thread that are not at all central
to our reasons for starting an official Gentoo Wiki. It's not about
hijacking your content. We already stated that we prefer to stick
with the license used for most other Gentoo documentation, which
prevents simply copying your content. So you don't need to worry
about that.

-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Zeerak Mustafa Waseem]

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On Sun, Apr 04, 2010 at 11:21:13PM +0100, AllenJB wrote:

> The way I see it, the "official" wiki has to earn my respect as a
> project. The unofficial wiki already has already been through this
> process. It's no different whether I'm trying a new piece of software or
> a new distro.
>
> It's not the URL that bothers me. I will, as I have said, quite happily
> move the articles I've written over, relicensing what I can if
> necessary, if/when I believe that the community would benefit.
>
> My problem is with the attitude of "let's start the official wiki by
> taking the content of the unofficial wiki, regardless of the wishes of
> the active contributors of those articles".
> 

Ah yeah, I should have been more specific with what I meant. What I wanted to ask (but looking back on my mail, not what I did ask) is, what is to stop the community at the unofficial wiki to migrate to the new wiki early in the project?
I don't know what you require for the new wiki to be able to gain your respect, but I imagine (wild guessing based on what it would take for it to gain my respect) that one thing is that it has quality articles, I also assume that another is activity. But in that regard, what you and the rest of the community have brought to gentoo-wiki would be a wonderful place to start for the official wiki.
I don't mean your articles, well your articles as well but not necessarily the article, I primarily mean a community well adjusted to working with a gentoo-specific wiki. You guys have provided some good articles and having your contribution (in form of willingness to work with the new wiki) would be a great asset, in my opinion anyway. 
 
I can understand that you have a problem with it if the first step is taking your work, but what if you were one of the first steps. I mean a successful wiki would be a wiki with an active usergroup (the unofficial one has that), good accurate articles (the unofficial wiki has that as well), and a decent rate of visitors (the articles are useful and relevant) and again, the unofficial wiki has that. You basically have what is necessary for gentoo to grow in this aspect. So the question ends up being, why wait for someone else to prove to you what you can prove to others? (And indeed have proven to others.) If your requirements for the official wiki to gain your respect are the same as mine, then why not help make sure that it meets those requirements?

> Yes, the license may allow you to do this, and legally you might be able
> to do so under the license. But the legal license and ethics/morals
> involved in such action are different things.
> 
> As I see it, the purpose of licensing my articles under an open license
> is to allow them to be contributed to and read without issues in the
> eventuality that the current wiki is lost for any reason (tho this is
> highly unlikely to happen again in the forseeable future as I and others
> now actively backup the content of the wiki, and the server maintainer
> has much better full backups in place) or the event that I am "hit by a
> bus".
> 

But in the end you have no control over who copies it. I mean hell, I could start a blog/wiki/whatever else and copy the contents of the unofficial wiki over. And in the end you can't (and by my estimate shouldn't) complain as you knew the terms when you entered, and if not you could stop any time you realized the terms. Whether or not they're contributed to another place than where you put them up, is what you agreed to.
I don't see any moral or ethical issues in this. I can understand why it might upset you, but in the end when you release something under a license that allows copying and editing it must be a situation you're prepared for. I do however see why you mgiht find it distasteful.

> 
> If those who wish to run an official wiki can see no sensible starting
> point other than copying the content of the unofficial wiki, then I
> would bring into question what the point of an official wiki would be,
> and why should the Gentoo developers psend time and resources on
> duplicating the efforts of the community when there is a huge long list
> of other things they could do that would provide services to the
> community that are not already catered for.
> 
> AllenJB
> 

+1 I completely agree with you, there is one reason as I can see it though. As it is at the moment there isn't a recommendation to help out with the unofficial wiki, if it became (part of) the official wiki such a recommendation would be put forth (I imagine). But then, a recommendation could be put forth now :-)
But other than that, I completely agree with you.

-- 
Zeerak Waseem

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 4 April 2010 16:33, AllenJB <gentoo-lists@allenjb.me.uk> wrote:
> I'd like to ask what you think in launching a site that simply clones an
> existing site is? Why take all the hard work the editors have put into
> their articles on the unofficial wiki and duplicate them on another
> site, creating TWO copies, both of which may be updated with different
> information.

Starting a wiki under the Gentoo umbrella is not about duplicating
effort. It is about providing services that we currently don't and
for which there is an apparent need.

First and foremost it is about providing developers a place for easy
(collaborative) editing of documents, so they wouldn't have to resort
to either less practical solutions within gentoo.org, or external
resources not under gentoo.org.

Secondly, this would be a good place to centralize efforts by both
users and developers to collaborate on generating, consolidating and
maintaining documentation. Currently these are scattered over a
number of places, as Dror has mentioned. We do not want to duplicate
effort, but work together to bring the various efforts as much as
possible into one place, a one-stop shop for all good and relevant
information about Gentoo.

> any site I find copying articles I've
> contributed to (and certainly the ones I wrote from scratch) will suffer
> all the wrath and abuse I can bring to it.

Then you shouldn't contribute to a wiki that has a license that
allows just that.

> An official wiki should not be used to duplicate the existing unofficial
> wiki (and I don't believe this is the intent of the developers who want
> one).

Not duplicate, but centralize and facilitate more collaboration. And
give it more recognition and better quality control. And host it on
the number one community site we have: gentoo.org, with all the
infrastructure support that entails.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 4 April 2010 09:31, Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 03:20:53 +0200
> Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> >> GuideXML documents are often experienced as an unnecessary
>> >> barrier.
>> >
>> > I think you should clearly state again that this is not gonna replace
>> > GuideXML, just migrate a few use cases where a wiki fits better.
>> > This is what you aim for, right?
>
> No, he's definitely out to kill GuideXML. Just give him time.

Let me start by saying I immensely value the work you do, even tho
we disagree on the merits of GuideXML. The GDP is an essential part
of what makes Gentoo great, and I am willing to work with you to
ensure that our documentation keeps the quality it is known for, and
improve it where possible. Even if that means working with an (in my
eyes) inferior technical solution.

That said, I still hope I can convince you that working with a wiki
has benefits over GuideXML and gorg. Some day. A man can hope...

>> A wiki can fulfill several purposes for us:
>>
>> 1. Easy collaboration among devs, for brainstorming, developing new
>>    documentation, assembling upcoming meeting agendas, and so on
>>    [for which there currently is not really any obvious place]
>
> This is not *impossible* with our current setup; it can still be done in a few different ways:
>
> 1) project spaces in /proj/$LANG/foobar/ -- how hard is it to commit to CVS when going through document drafts?
> 2) devspaces -- it's easy enough to dump stuff in here for others to refer to
>
> However, a wiki *does* make it easier for everyone to jump right in and edit stuff as ideas are passed around, rather than waiting for someone to make changes to something in a devspace.

Nobody said it is impossible. It's just not very practical. And the
fact that a growing number of official Gentoo projects are now using
external wikis is an indication that we need to provide this
ourselves.

>> 3. A place to host and maintain our existing documentation
>>    [which is currently in GuideXML]
>
> Entirely unnecessary duplication of effort. To quote the forum mods, "don't cross-post" . . . and especially don't do it if you'll be violating a doc license somewhere. It's one of the reasons why we don't use existing unofficial wiki content in our docs. I and the GDP have written about that ad nauseum over the years; just search the list archives.

Obviously we should not do anything that violates licenses, and I
don't see anyone promoting that. As far as I can see there is
agreement on using the CC-BY-SA license that is used in most of our
documentation. This means we can't copy-paste content from the
unofficial wiki. But in principle we could move existing official
documentation into the wiki.

Of course we would prefer to minimize duplication of effort. But
having all (or at least most) of our documentation in one place has
obvious benefits. So I hope I can convince the GDP to join us.

>> I am not pushing for our existing documentation to be migrated into a
>> wiki at this point. But I think that once the place is there, and it
>> functions well, it would be the obvious next step to do so. As I said
>> before, the barrier to contributing and maintaining documentation is
>> much higher in the case of GuideXML, so it doesn't really make sense
>> to keep that around when we have a better solution.
>>
>> I know there are people who do not agree with me on this last point
>
> . . . to say the least.
>
> Show me a wiki that has the flexibility of our handbook, which can be a huge printer-friendly all-in-one doc, or an as-you-need-it doc with one page per chapter.

As far as I know, we only use this functionality for our handbook.
But MediaWiki can do that with what they call transclusion.

> Show me a wiki that [does a number of things]

MediaWiki (like any major wiki) can do all those things. You are
basically showing your ignorance of wikis. Your arguments against
wikis seem to be based on your false impressions of them, not on
actual facts.

As has been pointed out, your table example was unfair, as they don't
do the same thing. I would frown on such inline styling (that's what
stylesheets are for), and there are a number of ways you can markup
tables in wikis. One is to allow HTML tags, so it would be very much
like GuideXML. Another one, which I prefer personally, is to use
reStructuredText, which is even clearer than HTML markup.

> By moving to a wiki, you'll lose a huge percentage of what GuideXML can do,

I don't see that at all. Is there any essential feature of GuideXML
that is missing in MediaWiki? (Let's take that wiki implementation as
the most likely one we will adopt.) I haven't seen anything yet that
is impossible or very difficult to do. Do you really think that
GuideXML is so special and advanced that nobody else had the same
needs and that major wiki engines do not provide in those needs?

> in exchange for "quicker" and "easier" editing and creation of docs, though neither of these have been qualified. As some others on this list have mentioned, wiki syntax is downright ugly and simply not as consistent or readable as plain ol' XML or HTML.

Wikis can use various markup systems. Whether the default wiki syntax
is ugly, is debatable. I don't think it's that bad, but it certainly
isn't perfect. As I've mentioned before, personally I prefer to use
reStructuredText, which is quite elegant, very readable and easy to
pick up. You could also use straight HTML markup, if you wanted to.
But most people seem to prefer standard wiki syntax.

And if you really wanted to, you could easily write an extension to
parse GuideXML, so it could be used as wiki markup. So again, the
markup is not really an argument against using a wiki instead of our
current GuideXML+gorg setup.

> From what I've seen, the biggest objection to GuideXML is folks don't want to take the time to learn a few tags.

No, that's not it. The two main objections, from what I can see are:

1. It is confusing, because it is an XML dialect that is similar to
   HTML, shares a number of tags, but then substitutes some for
   others, and has (for the casual user) seemingly arbitrary
   restrictions.
2. It is a non-transferable skill. You can't use it anywhere else.
   And unless you are a regular GuideXML writer, you will have to
   look up its particular usage almost every time you do use it.

> I've yet to see a wiki that even has as much sense as HTML, which is pretty low on the totem pole of consistency.

That's a non-argument as I showed above.

> I ain't out to stop ya'll from using a wiki. I do agree that they have some advantages. However, I will point out how limited wikis are. They're not a magic bullet that will solve all our problems.

Nobody is saying they are a magic bullet. But they are not as limited
as you believe they are. And a lot of people agree they are a better
solution than what we currently have.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Joshua Saddler]

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On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 17:23:54 +0200
Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:

> As has been pointed out, your table example was unfair, as they don't
> do the same thing. I would frown on such inline styling (that's what
> stylesheets are for), and there are a number of ways you can markup
> tables in wikis. One is to allow HTML tags, so it would be very much
> like GuideXML. Another one, which I prefer personally, is to use
> reStructuredText, which is even clearer than HTML markup.

Having to write a custom stylesheet just to get one wiki page to do what you want is pretty dumb.

How is it unfair? Because tables really are so much simpler to write in GuideXML? Here's a more complicated table:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap2_sect10
source: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml?passthru=1

> > By moving to a wiki, you'll lose a huge percentage of what GuideXML can do,
> 
> I don't see that at all. Is there any essential feature of GuideXML
> that is missing in MediaWiki? (Let's take that wiki implementation as
> the most likely one we will adopt.) I haven't seen anything yet that
> is impossible or very difficult to do. Do you really think that
> GuideXML is so special and advanced that nobody else had the same
> needs and that major wiki engines do not provide in those needs?

Mediawiki mostly involves memorizing how many quote or tick marks you use. This markup is *completely nonsemantic*. In GuideXML, you know EXACTLY what each tag means. It's semantic. <ul> starts an unordered list. <ol> starts an ordered list. <li> is a list item. <b> for bold text. <e> for emphasized text, similar to XHTML's <em> tag. <table> to start a table.

Mediawiki requires you to memorize numbers of marks to achieve the same effect: two ' ' for italic text, three ' ' ' for bold, five ' ' ' ' '  for bold AND italic.

Now take a look at the section on Mediawiki lists: whitespace becomes part of your formatting. Lame. At least with GuideXML, you can use whatever whitespace or linebreaks you want to keep code human-readable, and know that it won't affect the rendered version.

Oh, *and* you have to prefix Mediawiki list items with ; and : , which is completely nonsensical and arbitrary. The character doesn't explain what it's for, unlike semantic XML tags.

Take a good look at the Mediawiki "mixture of lists" sample:
(I'd provide a direct link, but there's no built-in way to snap to it)
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting

That is just plain ugly. The eye has a hard time unjumbling the ##s and ;:* crammed together. Also, note another flaw of Mediawiki:

At any time, you can throw in HTML and CSS to do stuff, because apparently Mediawiki isn't flexible enough on its own to generate your desired rendering. Having to mix HTML with a totally different wiki syntax is stupid. Having to learn CSS *on top* of learning wiki syntax (and HTML) just to write a document is retarded.

You've tried to make the case that learning GuideXML is too hard, but in order to use Mediawiki you'd need to learn at least 3 languages.

In my earlier email, I shared a code sample of GuideXML tabls. Mediawiki's idea of tables?

{| to start. |+ for a caption. |- for a row. ! for headers, and | for data. Use more || symbols for more rows.

Seriously, what part of this is easily understood to be table markup?

*And* you can mash in XHTML attributes to style the text. Big no-no. Leave the styling to a separate stylesheet, and let the code just be code.

Yeah, since Mediawiki tables can accept straight-up CSS (another skill you had all better learn if you're going to write valid code, apparently), you *can* do a bit more color formatting than with our existing XSL rules for GuideXML. I'll grant you that.

But that's at the price of standardization: since arbitrary tags and markup is allowed, there's nothing to keep consistency between documents, or even within the same document. GuideXML at least has a clean, consistent visual representation. Once you start allowing arbitrary markup, there'll be a million and one ways of representing the same thing, and that's not good for someone trying to wade through documents. There *should* be a standard way of representing information.

> And if you really wanted to, you could easily write an extension to
> parse GuideXML, so it could be used as wiki markup. So again, the
> markup is not really an argument against using a wiki instead of our
> current GuideXML+gorg setup.

Except I haven't seen Mediawiki offer anything like our textual color palette or other code syntax and block-level formatting flexibility.

> 2. It is a non-transferable skill. You can't use it anywhere else.
>    And unless you are a regular GuideXML writer, you will have to
>    look up its particular usage almost every time you do use it.

It's just XML. That's all. If you can write HTML, then you can write XML. XML is *easier*. It's got far fewer tags, for starters. That means much, much less to learn.

Oh, and guess what? You ebuild writers are already using XML every single time you make changes to ebuilds: metadata.xml, etc.

Most of us have used GuideXML at some point or another in our /proj/ webpages and devspaces, if not in /doc/en/. Guess what? That's the same XML, and there's much, much more content constantly written for /proj/ and dev.g.o than for /doc/. So don't try to tell me that people don't have at least passing familiarity with it.

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[George Prowse]

On 04/04/2010 20:33, Joshua Saddler wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 17:23:54 +0200
> Ben de Groot<yngwin@gentoo.org>  wrote:
>
>>...
>
>...

GuideXML is only easy if you are used to xml or html. Wikimarkup is only 
easy if you are used to it as well. The difference is that with 
mediawiki all you have to do is press a button to get your italics, 
headers, lists and whatever else - making the chance having 
documentation written a lot higher.

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 4 April 2010 21:33, Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Having to write a custom stylesheet just to get one wiki page to do what you want is pretty dumb.

Yes it would be. The idea is that you design consistent styling from
the get-go, so your stylesheets will be ready for those needs. Pretty
much the same as the current documentation solution.

> How is it unfair? Because tables really are so much simpler to write in GuideXML?

No, because they were displaying different things, using different features.

> Here's a more complicated table:
>
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap2_sect10
> source: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml?passthru=1

And you think that's intuitive? Tables are a bitch, and I think both
the GuideXML approach (copied from HTML) and the wiki syntax one are
equally unintuitive. In my opinion reStructuredText is offering a
better alternative:
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#tables

> Mediawiki mostly involves memorizing how many quote or tick marks you use.

The beauty is: you don't have to memorize it, as it is just a click of
a button on the editor interface away.

> This markup is *completely nonsemantic*. In GuideXML, you know EXACTLY what each tag means.

No, I don't. The body and title tags are used quite differently from
HTML, which is confusing. When do I use section and when do I use
body? And what the frak is stmt? And why uri and figure instead of
HTML's a and img tags? Except to a few dedicated people, GuideXML is
confusing.

> At any time, you can throw in HTML and CSS to do stuff, because apparently Mediawiki isn't flexible enough on its own to generate your desired rendering.

Rather, it's so flexible that it even accomodates using HTML and CSS
should you wish so. But you don't have to.

> Having to mix HTML with a totally different wiki syntax is stupid.

Having to mix HTML with a different dialect of XML is equally stupid,
and moreover it is confusing. At least with MediaWiki, you don't have
to use it, as there are other options.

> Having to learn CSS *on top* of learning wiki syntax (and HTML) just to write a document is retarded.

Wiki editors will not have to learn CSS, unless you have very specific
needs that are unforeseen by the designers of the stylesheets you use.

> You've tried to make the case that learning GuideXML is too hard, but in order to use Mediawiki you'd need to learn at least 3 languages.

You don't need to at all. Depending on how the maintainer configures
things, at most one markup language should be enough. And that is
greatly helped by the editor UI. So for most simple edits you don't
need to learn any markup language at all.

> [...] Leave the styling to a separate stylesheet, and let the code just be code.

Yes, that's the whole idea. It's just that MediaWiki offers the
flexibility to use those extra features, but you don't have to use
them.

> But that's at the price of standardization: since arbitrary tags and markup is allowed, there's nothing to keep consistency between documents, or even within the same document.

That's a matter of configuration. I'm all for locking that down and
use a consistent standard styling, so only relatively simple markup is
needed. (But we'd have the flexibility to do something more complex
should we wish to configure things so.)

> GuideXML at least has a clean, consistent visual representation. Once you start allowing arbitrary markup, there'll be a million and one ways of representing the same thing, and that's not good for someone trying to wade through documents. There *should* be a standard way of representing information.

I absolutely agree. And you can achieve the same with a wiki.

>> And if you really wanted to, you could easily write an extension to
>> parse GuideXML, so it could be used as wiki markup. So again, the
>> markup is not really an argument against using a wiki instead of our
>> current GuideXML+gorg setup.
>
> Except I haven't seen Mediawiki offer anything like our textual color palette or other code syntax and block-level formatting flexibility.

What do you mean? You can predefine styles in your CSS to express your
"textual color palette" (if I understand correctly what you meant by
that). There is advanced code syntax highlighting available, for
example using GeSHi.

>> 2. It is a non-transferable skill. You can't use it anywhere else.
>>    And unless you are a regular GuideXML writer, you will have to
>>    look up its particular usage almost every time you do use it.
>
> It's just XML. That's all. If you can write HTML, then you can write XML. XML is *easier*. It's got far fewer tags, for starters. That means much, much less to learn.

That's not fully correct. XML has in principle a practically infinite
number of tags. It all depends on which "dialect" you use. If it is a
dialect you do not use a lot, you will forget the usage of particular
tags.

> Oh, and guess what? You ebuild writers are already using XML every single time you make changes to ebuilds: metadata.xml, etc.

Yes, and I find that often I have to look up the specific usage of
anything beyond the standard minimal set of tags.

> Most of us have used GuideXML at some point or another in our /proj/ webpages and devspaces, if not in /doc/en/. Guess what? That's the same XML, and there's much, much more content constantly written for /proj/ and dev.g.o than for /doc/. So don't try to tell me that people don't have at least passing familiarity with it.

That's not the point. The problem is that most of us don't use it
often enough to be sufficiently fluent in it, and you will never use
it for anything else but gentoo.org pages. Moreover, there is no web
UI for quick edits, with helpful buttons and hints...

-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Joshua Saddler]

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On Mon, 5 Apr 2010 02:08:06 +0200
Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On 4 April 2010 21:33, Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Having to write a custom stylesheet just to get one wiki page to do what
> > you want is pretty dumb.
> 
> Yes it would be. The idea is that you design consistent styling from
> the get-go, so your stylesheets will be ready for those needs. Pretty
> much the same as the current documentation solution.
> 
> > How is it unfair? Because tables really are so much simpler to write in
> > GuideXML?
> 
> No, because they were displaying different things, using different features.
> 
> > Here's a more complicated table:
> >
> > http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap2_sect10
> > source: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml?passthru=1
> 
> And you think that's intuitive? Tables are a bitch, and I think both
> the GuideXML approach (copied from HTML) and the wiki syntax one are
> equally unintuitive. In my opinion reStructuredText is offering a
> better alternative:
> http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#tables

At least the GuideXML approach to tables is familiar to anyone who's worked with HTML. Oh wait, you shouldn't be comparing GuideXML with HTML. More on that later in this message.

Also, don't get me started on rST's many failings. It's just like wiki syntax, in that anything you want to do besides line spaces and lists involves stupid nonsemantic code. Having to define URIs twice is retarded:

"External hyperlinks sample sentence, like Python_."

.. _Python: http://www.python.org/ 


Tables:
A big problem with rST and wiki markup is that they try to preserve the rendered format within the source code view.

+------------+------------+-----------+
| Header 1   | Header 2   | Header 3  |
+============+============+===========+
| body row 1 | column 2   | column 3  |
+------------+------------+-----------+ 

That's rST source. This gets unwieldy very quickly for larger tables, as they'll overflow your editor window. Hey, that might not be a problem, but it's also a losing proposition to try to have that stuff rendered within the source view.

Let the renderer take care of the final rendering, as really, tags and markup are all arbitrary. What should matter is how it appears in your webbrowser, since that'll vary from the source view anyways.

. . . I hope you aren't seriously suggested rST as the wiki format.

> > Mediawiki mostly involves memorizing how many quote or tick marks you use.
> 
> The beauty is: you don't have to memorize it, as it is just a click of
> a button on the editor interface away.

And not everyone will want to do that. I certainly don't like clicking around when it's easier and faster for me to just type the code myself.

Really, you're mostly making a case for a graphical XML editor like Beacon, rather than making a case for a wiki. :)

> > This markup is *completely nonsemantic*. In GuideXML, you know EXACTLY what
> > each tag means.

> No, I don't. The body and title tags are used quite differently from
> HTML, which is confusing. When do I use section and when do I use
> body? And what the frak is stmt? And why uri and figure instead of
> HTML's a and img tags? Except to a few dedicated people, GuideXML is
> confusing.

That's your problem, then. Do you know what semantic means? Semantic doesn't mean "just like HTML." So stop treating it that way. Let's look at semantic tags.

It's not hard to see that <var> is a variable and that <stmt> is a statement, and <comment> is a comment. Semantic markup is markup that means what it says. Using punctuation marks like '  '' ; : is neither semantically useful nor easily readable, as I showed in the code samples you oh-so-casually skipped over. Nice try. ' and ' ' mean nothing in and of themselves.

But you're not a web author, so I'll stop trying to beat you over the head with how things work. Next point:

> Having to mix HTML with a different dialect of XML is equally stupid,
> and moreover it is confusing. At least with MediaWiki, you don't have
> to use it, as there are other options.

Why the hell do you keep bringing up HTML? Stop comparing GuideXML with HTML. Treat them as two separate languages, please.

I only mentioned GuideXML in the context of "it's easier to learn because it has fewer tags than HTML" -- you operate under the mistaken assumption that GuideXML should be *like* HTML, and that HTML has too many tags. You assume that everyone comes from an HTML background and thus will be confused by GuideXML.

> What do you mean? You can predefine styles in your CSS to express your
> "textual color palette" (if I understand correctly what you meant by
> that). There is advanced code syntax highlighting available, for
> example using GeSHi.

Okay, then you also need a way to get those styles into your document by coming up with new tags or wiki markup.

<var> is a variable in GuideXML, and it'll be colored yellow. You mark this variable in a <pre> block with the <var> tag, which is created just for this purpose. How do you accomplish this in, say, Mediawiki syntax? Without trying to recycle some crap bit of HTML or tacking on inline styles.

Using <span> is ugly, because it's HTML. You should NEVER have to use more than one markup language at a time.

Do all the wikis out there have solutions for adding custom markup/tags?

> That's not fully correct. XML has in principle a practically infinite
> number of tags. It all depends on which "dialect" you use. If it is a
> dialect you do not use a lot, you will forget the usage of particular
> tags.

By "XML" I mean GuideXML.

And yes, clearly GuideXML and metadata.xml are some of your weak areas if you have to keep looking up the basics. However, with practice you *will* get better. :)

> > Most of us have used GuideXML at some point or another in our /proj/
> > webpages and devspaces, if not in /doc/en/. Guess what? That's the same
> > XML, and there's much, much more content constantly written for /proj/ and
> > dev.g.o than for /doc/. So don't try to tell me that people don't have at
> > least passing familiarity with it.
> 
> That's not the point. The problem is that most of us don't use it
> often enough to be sufficiently fluent in it, and you will never use
> it for anything else but gentoo.org pages. Moreover, there is no web
> UI for quick edits, with helpful buttons and hints...

And you'll never use wiki syntax for anything but wiki pages. Specifically, the syntax of whatever wiki is chosen, and not all wikis are equal, so there's no guarantee that your syntax will be useful elsewhere. What's your point?

Quick edits are edits that go right to the code, where you don't have to slow down by using anything but the keyboard. Work with web languages long enough, and you'll appreciate not being hampered by a GUI.

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 5 April 2010 03:13, Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Let the renderer take care of the final rendering, as really, tags and markup are all arbitrary. What should matter is how it appears in your webbrowser, since that'll vary from the source view anyways.

So why are you such a staunch defender of GuideXML then? If markup is
arbitrary really, then why not allow people to use what is convenient?

> . . . I hope you aren't seriously suggested rST as the wiki format.

I already did. I realize I may be in the minority, but I've become
quite a fan of the format. It's easy, quite elegant, has a full set of
features and is quite flexible. And it is widely used outside of
Gentoo. I hope there will be at least the possibility of using rst in
the Gentoo Wiki.

>> > Mediawiki mostly involves memorizing how many quote or tick marks you use.
>>
>> The beauty is: you don't have to memorize it, as it is just a click of
>> a button on the editor interface away.
>
> And not everyone will want to do that. I certainly don't like clicking around when it's easier and faster for me to just type the code myself.

So you don't have to. The wiki software in itself is not limiting, so
it's a question of configuration and agreeing on what to use.

> Really, you're mostly making a case for a graphical XML editor like Beacon, rather than making a case for a wiki. :)

That would already be a big improvement, yes.

> That's your problem, then. Do you know what semantic means?

Yes, I do. No need to be condescending.

> But you're not a web author,

I am, altho not as active lately.

> Why the hell do you keep bringing up HTML? Stop comparing GuideXML with HTML. Treat them as two separate languages, please.

Because clearly GuideXML is based on HTML. And anyone who knows HTML
will likely be confused by some features of GuideXML. I can't treat
them as completely separate, as there is too much overlap.

> I only mentioned GuideXML in the context of "it's easier to learn because it has fewer tags than HTML" -- you operate under the mistaken assumption that GuideXML should be *like* HTML,

No, I wish it weren't, but it *is* like HTML.

> and that HTML has too many tags.

I never said that.

> You assume that everyone comes from an HTML background and thus will be confused by GuideXML.

I would think that most people that become involved with Gentoo have
most likely been exposed to some HTML coding.

>> What do you mean? You can predefine styles in your CSS to express your
>> "textual color palette" (if I understand correctly what you meant by
>> that). There is advanced code syntax highlighting available, for
>> example using GeSHi.
>
> Okay, then you also need a way to get those styles into your document by coming up with new tags or wiki markup.
>
> <var> is a variable in GuideXML, and it'll be colored yellow. You mark this variable in a <pre> block with the <var> tag, which is created just for this purpose. How do you accomplish this in, say, Mediawiki syntax? Without trying to recycle some crap bit of HTML or tacking on inline styles.

You can use syntax highlighting or templates.

> Do all the wikis out there have solutions for adding custom markup/tags?

All? Probably not out of the box. You could always hack the source
code of course. ;)

> And yes, clearly GuideXML and metadata.xml are some of your weak areas if you have to keep looking up the basics. However, with practice you *will* get better. :)

If there would be a need for that, then yes, I would get better.

Anyway, this exchange has gone well beyond the original scope of the
thread, and neither of us seems to have come much closer to convincing
the other. So I'll leave it at that.

-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Arun Raghavan]

On 5 April 2010 08:13, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 5 April 2010 03:13, Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
[...]
>> Really, you're mostly making a case for a graphical XML editor like Beacon, rather than making a case for a wiki. :)
>
> That would already be a big improvement, yes.
>
>> That's your problem, then. Do you know what semantic means?
>
> Yes, I do. No need to be condescending.
>
>> But you're not a web author,
>
> I am, altho not as active lately.
>
>> Why the hell do you keep bringing up HTML? Stop comparing GuideXML with HTML. Treat them as two separate languages, please.
>
> Because clearly GuideXML is based on HTML. And anyone who knows HTML
> will likely be confused by some features of GuideXML. I can't treat
> them as completely separate, as there is too much overlap.
>
>> I only mentioned GuideXML in the context of "it's easier to learn because it has fewer tags than HTML" -- you operate under the mistaken assumption that GuideXML should be *like* HTML,
>
> No, I wish it weren't, but it *is* like HTML.
>
>> and that HTML has too many tags.
>
> I never said that.
>
>> You assume that everyone comes from an HTML background and thus will be confused by GuideXML.
>
> I would think that most people that become involved with Gentoo have
> most likely been exposed to some HTML coding.

You guys should take a while to cool off at this stage.

Quite frankly, the documentation project is just another open source
project - if anyone wants to change how things are done, the only real
way to do that is join the team, prove that you are dedicated and
committed, and promote change from the inside.

Cheers,
-- 
Arun Raghavan
http://arunraghavan.net/
(Ford_Prefect | Gentoo) & (arunsr | GNOME)

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Arun Raghavan]

On 5 April 2010 10:34, Arun Raghavan <ford_prefect@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 5 April 2010 08:13, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On 5 April 2010 03:13, Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
[...]
> You guys should take a while to cool off at this stage.

Never mind me. I missed Ben's last email.
-- 
Arun Raghavan
http://arunraghavan.net/
(Ford_Prefect | Gentoo) & (arunsr | GNOME)

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ed W]

On 05/04/2010 03:43, Ben de Groot wrote:
> On 5 April 2010 03:13, Joshua Saddler<nightmorph@gentoo.org>  wrote:
>    
>> Let the renderer take care of the final rendering, as really, tags and markup are all arbitrary. What should matter is how it appears in your webbrowser, since that'll vary from the source view anyways.
>>      
> So why are you such a staunch defender of GuideXML then? If markup is
> arbitrary really, then why not allow people to use what is convenient?
>
>    

I do think arguing about the syntax is the wrong target (as I think you 
agree above).

The magic of a wiki is:

- Focus on the text and not on the formatting
- Goal of simplicity to bang in a bunch of content without needing to 
worry about formatting
- Granularity of edits, eg edit a single word and not get overwritten by 
another change which edits a different single word
- Web based editing from any machine without installing stuff
- Extremely low barriers to contributing

I think these goals could be satisfied by a decent system around 
GuideXML as much as from an arbitrary Wiki engine?

The real magic is in getting lots of users to start contributing and 
that largely comes from having very few barriers to contributing.

If you remember the original Wikipedia it involved requiring to pass 
some tests to become a contributor and it was basically a closed editor 
system.  It failed dismally... The revamped wikipedia allowed anyone to 
edit and whilst we can debate the merits of the final product, it's 
certainly been popular.  So I claim that low barriers to entry and ease 
of editing is the real target - the markup is important, but definitely 
secondary to the engine itself


Good luck

Ed W

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ed W]

Hi

> Show me a wiki that makes it easy to create tables, for example, compare RadeonProgram from the x.org wiki:
>
> http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonProgram?action=edit
>
> ||<-2 style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666">  '''Native''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666">  '''R100''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666">  '''R200''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666">  '''R300''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666">  '''R400''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666">  '''RS690''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666">  '''R500''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666">  '''R600''' ||<style="text-align: center; background-color: #666666">  '''R700''' ||
>
>
> . . . that's one line of cells. One. Ugly. Compare it to:
>
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml#doc_chap5_pre1
>
> <table>
> <tr>
>    <th>Foo</th>
>    <th>Bar</th>
> </tr>
> <tr>
>    <ti>This is an example for indentation</ti>
>    <ti>more stuff</ti>
> </tr>
> </table>
>
> Which is easier to read and instantly comprehend?
>    

Yes, but the wiki layout is badly written, you should be comparing it to:


|| '''Native''' || '''R100''' || '''R200''' || '''R300''' || '''R400''' || '''RS690''' || '''R500''' || '''R600''' || '''R700''' ||


I think this reads ok?  In fact with a bit of thought from some premade 
styles even the ''' bit should go?


> By moving to a wiki, you'll lose a huge percentage of what GuideXML can do, in exchange for "quicker" and "easier" editing and creation of docs, though neither of these have been qualified.

I think this summarises the basic tradeoff - you trade editing speed for 
"simplicity" of syntax and readability.  Clearly as your example shows 
it's possible to write complicated looking stuff in any syntax though, 
but in general wiki's win where the content is most important and 
styling is done separately using CSS (a bit like guideXML really)

>   As some others on this list have mentioned, wiki syntax is downright ugly and simply not as consistent or readable as plain ol' XML or HTML.
>    

I think this is a point of contention.  Certainly it was a design goal 
for the wiki syntax to be simple and easily readable, but one man's 
"simple" is another mans XML...


>  From what I've seen, the biggest objection to GuideXML is folks don't want to take the time to learn a few tags. Well, you'll have to learn tags and syntax for either system, so pick your poison. I've yet to see a wiki that even has as much sense as HTML, which is pretty low on the totem pole of consistency.
>    

Actually I think GuideXML is excellent - if there is a wiki style engine 
which allows you to post in GuideXML then we should do it?

I think it's not an objection to the GuideXML which is the problem, but 
creating a system which can be edited quickly and easily in a granular 
fashion.  Eg imagine all the guideXML docs being in a git repo with open 
access to pull/push changes - you could build a web engine around that 
which rebuilds the web pages interactively as people push edits and this 
would be cool!  In the meantime wiki's are just trying to solve the same 
goal of easy edits with small granularity of edits

However, I love the idea of a "wiki" based around git using GuideXML! 
(probably it kind of works like this right now - I think it's the access 
control which is the secret sauce...)

> I ain't out to stop ya'll from using a wiki. I do agree that they have some advantages. However, I will point out how limited wikis are. They're not a magic bullet that will solve all our problems.
>    

Definitely.

Good luck

Ed W

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Alex Legler]

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On Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:37:03 +0200, Sebastian Pipping
<sping@gentoo.org> wrote:

> [...]
> > >> Here's another idea:
> >> The German Wikipedia uses a concept called "sighted revisions". If
> >> you visit an article without logging in you will see the latest
> >> sighted revision, as an identified user you can also view the
> >> latest revision.
> > 
> > That's an interesting idea, which we should consider.
> 
> I'm not sure if that a thing to go for.  Drawbacks:
> - More work  (whereas we could use more manpower already)

We need moderators, that is clear. If they check the content for
correctness and remove spam they might just as well click one more
checkbox to mark a stable revision.

> - New bottlenecks

That's sorta point #1 rephrased.

> Couldn't we just make two big "namespaces"
> 
>   'devs'        -- Developers only
>   'registered'  -- Full edit access to any registered user
> 
> in the same wiki and have pages be in either namespace, reflecting the
> namespace in the page name or path somehow?
> 

In MediaWiki, that'd be the nil namespace for 'registered',
i.e.
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/25WaysToBreakYourMachine

and $whatever for 'devs':
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Devs:25WaysToBreakYourMachine
or
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Devwiki:25WaysToBreakYourMachine

For MoinMoin, I'd suggest what they call a wikicluster.
users:
http://wiki.gentoo.org/gentoowiki/25WaysToBreakYourMachine

devs:
http://wiki.gentoo.org/devwiki/25WaysToBreakYourMachine

> I expect that to be
> - easy to implement

For both, yes.

> - providing a good mix of openness and quality control
> 
> 
> > GuideXML documents are often experienced as an unnecessary
> > barrier.
> 
> I think you should clearly state again that this is not gonna replace
> GuideXML, just migrate a few use cases where a wiki fits better.
> This is what you aim for, right?
> 

!

-- 
Alex Legler | Gentoo Security / Ruby
a3li@gentoo.org | a3li@jabber.ccc.de

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Alex Legler]

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On Sat, 3 Apr 2010 15:19:20 +0200, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org>
wrote:

> Okay, so it seems a lot of people do want a wiki. So let's see what
> we can do to make that happen.
> 

I created a Wiki page (oh, the irony) to track the results of this
thread in the Gentoo eV wiki:
http://gentoo-ev.org/wiki/Official_Gentoo_wiki

Feel free to edit the page or email me changes.

Alex

-- 
Alex Legler | Gentoo Security / Ruby
a3li@gentoo.org | a3li@jabber.ccc.de

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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Sebastian Pipping]

Ben, good to see you driving this process!  Thanks!



Sebastian

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Alistair Bush]

> 1 - requirements
> ================
> 
> In order to choose the best possible wiki implementation, we need to
> know our requirements. So what features do you think are essential or
> good to have? What syntax would we prefer to use?
> 
> I myself am a big fan of reStructuredText, which is quite simple,
> easy to pick up, highly readable, and has a good featureset. Plus, it
> is also reusable in other contexts (it is for example widely used in
> documentation of Python libraries). MediaWiki, MoinMoin and Trac have
> support for rst.

I'm not overly concerned about what wiki we use.   But may I suggest we 
approach gentoo-wiki to see whether they would like to be involved.

> 
> Some others:
> 
> - active upstream (bug fixes, security updates)
> - free open source software
> - ACLs
> - spam prevention measures
> - attachments (to upload screenshots for example)
> - feeds
> 
> Other distros and open source projects surely have had the same
> considerations. Can we find out and learn from them?
> 
> 
> 2 - maintainers
> ===============
> 
> Who is volunteering for maintaining the wiki? We need editors and
> moderators, people who look out for quality control and take care of
> spam removal. So let's get together a team. I'm sure if we ask on the
> forums we'll get some users interested as well.

I would like to help as I may.   Hopefully we can get a good body of users to 
help as well.  I'm of the firm belief that it will be users who should make 
this idea either fly or crash down hard.    Dev's have official means of 
documenting stuff. 

> 
> 
> 3 - edit access
> ===============
> 
> Do we keep to the original "free for all" model, with all the spam
> that includes, or do we go with registered users only? I think the
> latter is the smarter option. I also think we will want to mark
> certain pages "official" and lock down editing rights.
> 

Registered users only please.

> 
> Is there anything else we should consider before getting started?

What project should we create this under.

gdp is for official documentation so I don't think it should be under that but 
it could very well be under userrel.  Or it could be a new project.

I also have some other ideas that I would like to implement once I get around 
to brain-dumping them.   So I will simply ask this question.

Are there any complimentary services we could offer users besides a wiki?  
Maybe best to just think about this and not answer it here.

> 
> Cheers,

Alistair

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 5 April 2010 02:02, Alistair Bush <ali_bush@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I'm not overly concerned about what wiki we use.   But may I suggest we
> approach gentoo-wiki to see whether they would like to be involved.

If anybody wants to approach them, that is fine by me. I'm probably
not the right person for that job, due to my critical remarks. We have
approached the gentoo-wiki.com owner in past and he then declined to
cooperate.

> I would like to help as I may.

Thanks, that would be very welcome.

>> Is there anything else we should consider before getting started?
>
> What project should we create this under.

I was thinking to start a wiki project.

> I also have some other ideas that I would like to implement once I get around
> to brain-dumping them.   So I will simply ask this question.
>
> Are there any complimentary services we could offer users besides a wiki?
> Maybe best to just think about this and not answer it here.

That's a very good question, and I hope to hear some answers,
especially from users.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

[gentoo-dev] Re: [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Duncan]

Ben de Groot posted on Mon, 05 Apr 2010 02:25:11 +0200 as excerpted:

> On 5 April 2010 02:02, Alistair Bush <ali_bush@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> I'm not overly concerned about what wiki we use.   But may I suggest we
>> approach gentoo-wiki to see whether they would like to be involved.
> 
> If anybody wants to approach them, that is fine by me. I'm probably not
> the right person for that job, due to my critical remarks. We have
> approached the gentoo-wiki.com owner in past and he then declined to
> cooperate.

There's also the very real license issue.  As others have mentioned, that 
no-commercial-use bit isn't particularly appropriate for a Gentoo-official 
wiki.  So even if the gentoo-wiki.com owner was ideally cooperative, while 
the value of his experience and contacts shouldn't be underestimated, the 
direct content contribution would have to be limited to pointers from each 
site to the other, and enthusiastic moral support.

But there's no use making an enemy of what can be a friend, either.  So 
please do make a deliberate and continued effort to keep the communication 
lines open, to the degree possible from this side, anyway.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Matti Bickel]

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Alistair Bush wrote:
 > I'm not overly concerned about what wiki we use.   But may I suggest we
> approach gentoo-wiki to see whether they would like to be involved.

+1, especially the "overly concerned" part. Seriously folks. Just start
it. Take whatever you as a person feel comfortable with. Talk to infra,
if there are concerns about security. Then get moving. Maybe even set up
multiple implementations and start evaluating, if you can trick infra
into doing the setup. If not, you'd have to live with what they give you.

You can theorize all you want about the best possible solution. That
will just clog up the pipes and piss users off no end. It certainly did
so for me. I'm now at the point where i'm willing to bet money on the
wiki request never actually reaching infra.

Can we please go back to happy days where guys and gals worked on an
implementation FIRST, posted to lists SECOND and ironed out errors via
peer review THIRD? It'll make us all more productive.

> What project should we create this under.

Please don't make it another project. This will just create a new
territory and spread resources even thinner. Take one of the
"user-facing" projects like forums or userrel.
But don't let this be a blocker to get things done. You can always
change ownership of the stuff once you actually get some property to
talk about.

An important lesson i've learned during the last days as i've taken up
php stuff: people, users and devs alike, will step up to help you, do
things for you, work with you and be generally amazing if you
(1) ask specific, detailed questions and
(2) provide some of the work yourself.

Usually you have to do (2) before you can do (1). Applying this the wiki
debate, you
(1) ask specific, *technical* questions, you ideally answer with yes/no
  (1.1) Do we have an ebuild for it? If no, can i maintain one?
  (1.2) Will infra emerge the ebuild for me? If not, why not?
  (1.3) Who do i pester about my administrator access data?
  (1.4) Who can i use as lab-monk^W^W^Wa test group? How to reach them?
(2) set up some fscking wiki and let people play with it.
(3) profit ;)


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto]

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On 03-04-2010 13:19, Ben de Groot wrote:
< A proposal for a Gentoo WIKI that generated much replies>

I have the following general comments about this thread.

 * I congratulate everyone involved on this that is so motivated to
create a new option for hosting content for the Developers and Community
at large and wish all the best for this project.

 * I would humbly like to suggest that there will be a larger chance of
success for this project if those promoting it focus on the benefits it
can bring, work on generating new content and give up on the idea of
"replacing" other projects and communities.
In particular I'd also advice people in this project to work with
existing projects and communities and to avoid clashes over content,
format and or merit.

 * If those involved in this project are willing to, I think it could
fit well within the User Relations area as this is another way to reach
out to our community.

- -- 
Regards,

Jorge Vicetto (jmbsvicetto) - jmbsvicetto at gentoo dot org
Gentoo- forums / Userrel / Devrel / KDE / Elections
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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 5 April 2010 04:01, Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto
<jmbsvicetto@gentoo.org> wrote:
>  * I congratulate everyone involved on this that is so motivated to
> create a new option for hosting content for the Developers and Community
> at large and wish all the best for this project.

Thank you!

>  * I would humbly like to suggest that there will be a larger chance of
> success for this project if those promoting it focus on the benefits it
> can bring, work on generating new content and give up on the idea of
> "replacing" other projects and communities.
> In particular I'd also advice people in this project to work with
> existing projects and communities and to avoid clashes over content,
> format and or merit.

Yes, the thread made some excursions, but let's focus on the task at
hand. The wiki is in the first place about offering something that has
been missing. It is also about bringing people together. It is not
about duplicating effort.

>  * If those involved in this project are willing to, I think it could
> fit well within the User Relations area as this is another way to reach
> out to our community.

I'm not sure UserRel is exactly the right fit, as we very much also
are about offering services to developers for more "internal" use,
such as project meeting agendas. I do think we should work closely
together, like the other "participating projects" mentioned on the
UserRel project page.

-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[René 'Necoro' Neumann]

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Am 03.04.2010 15:19, schrieb Ben de Groot:
> On 3 April 2010 11:46, Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On 04/03/10 11:16, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
>>> People are constantly asking for a documentation wiki, but ...
>> yeah, as long as no one just creates a wiki there won't be one. People
>> are waiting on other people, who are waiting for Godot. Just do it.
>>
>> I remember the long and whiny road to get a blog aggregator - what
>> killed the waiting deadlock was simply karltk setting up one (unofficial
>> etc.etc.) and suddenly people saw that it was good.
> 
> 
> Okay, so it seems a lot of people do want a wiki. So let's see what
> we can do to make that happen.

Just curious: Was something achieved here? Is there a wiki finally?

- René


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ben de Groot]

On 3 June 2010 22:44, René 'Necoro' Neumann <lists@necoro.eu> wrote:
> Am 03.04.2010 15:19, schrieb Ben de Groot:
>> On 3 April 2010 11:46, Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> On 04/03/10 11:16, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
>>>> People are constantly asking for a documentation wiki, but ...
>>> yeah, as long as no one just creates a wiki there won't be one. People
>>> are waiting on other people, who are waiting for Godot. Just do it.
>>>
>>> I remember the long and whiny road to get a blog aggregator - what
>>> killed the waiting deadlock was simply karltk setting up one (unofficial
>>> etc.etc.) and suddenly people saw that it was good.
>>
>>
>> Okay, so it seems a lot of people do want a wiki. So let's see what
>> we can do to make that happen.
>
> Just curious: Was something achieved here? Is there a wiki finally?

The first steps were taken. There is now a wiki project, for which I
initially was the project lead. But very soon after that DevRel-member
Calchan killed my momentum. I have suspended all my active work on
Gentoo until my DevRel issue is resolved. Sadly this also killed the
wiki's momentum. From what I understand it is still being worked on,
but it moves forward very slowly. Maybe someone from the wiki project
could add some more up to date info?

Cheers,
Ben

Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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Am Freitag, den 04.06.2010, 00:49 +0200 schrieb Ben de Groot:
> From what I understand it is still being worked on,
> but it moves forward very slowly. Maybe someone from the wiki project
> could add some more up to date info?

Initially I was one of those who offered to help with the wiki project
and I'm still listed as a member. Accidentally I noticed an initial
project meeting which was announced via planet.g.o - but I wasn't able
to attend that meeting, as i noticed it just a day or two before. From
then on ... I heard just nothing wrt the Wiki project. Sad to say, but
that's yet another Gentoo communications fail.

- Tobias


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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Sebastian Pipping]

Tobias,


On 06/04/10 05:53, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> I wasn't able to attend that meeting, as i noticed it just a day or
> two before. From then on ... I heard just nothing wrt the Wiki
> project.

Have you contacted people who took part in the meeting asking for
details and results?



Sebastian

[gentoo-dev] Re: [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Torsten Veller]

* Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123@gentoo.org>:
> Accidentally I noticed an initial project meeting which was announced
> via planet.g.o - but I wasn't able to attend that meeting, as i
> noticed it just a day or two before.

The meeting was also announced on the wiki alias. Five days before the
meeting you should have got a mail. I think this is sufficient.

-- 
Regards Torsten

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Markos Chandras]

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After all, we need to have further discussion on every single aspect so the
previous meeting didn't decide anything at all

The log is here [1] if anyone is interested in.

[1]:http://dev.gentoo.org/~hwoarang/files/meeting-1-log.txt

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 8:51 AM, Torsten Veller <tove@gentoo.org> wrote:

> * Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123@gentoo.org>:
> > Accidentally I noticed an initial project meeting which was announced
> > via planet.g.o - but I wasn't able to attend that meeting, as i
> > noticed it just a day or two before.
>
> The meeting was also announced on the wiki alias. Five days before the
> meeting you should have got a mail. I think this is sufficient.
>
> --
> Regards Torsten
>
>

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RE: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Sylvain Alain]

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> Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2010 01:37:03 +0200
> From: sping@gentoo.org
> To: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki
> 
> On 04/03/10 16:46, Ben de Groot wrote:
> >> I propose to use MediaWiki.
> > 
> > As I said in my other post, MediaWiki and MoinMoin should, in my
> > opinion, be on our shortlist to consider.
> 
> My vote on MediaWiki, too.
> 
> (I do like DokuWiki better for personal things but mediaWiki seems the
> best choice for a project this large.)
> 
> Btw was it Fedora having moved from MoinMoin to MediaWiki?
> I remember something like that, could be erring though.
> 
> 
> >> Here's another idea:
> >> The German Wikipedia uses a concept called "sighted revisions". If you
> >> visit an article without logging in you will see the latest sighted
> >> revision, as an identified user you can also view the latest revision.
> > 
> > That's an interesting idea, which we should consider.
> 
> I'm not sure if that a thing to go for.  Drawbacks:
> - More work  (whereas we could use more manpower already)
> - New bottlenecks
> 
> Couldn't we just make two big "namespaces"
> 
>   'devs'        -- Developers only
>   'registered'  -- Full edit access to any registered user
> 
> in the same wiki and have pages be in either namespace, reflecting the
> namespace in the page name or path somehow?
> 
> I expect that to be
> - easy to implement
> - providing a good mix of openness and quality control
> 
> 
> > GuideXML documents are often experienced as an unnecessary
> > barrier.
> 
> I think you should clearly state again that this is not gonna replace
> GuideXML, just migrate a few use cases where a wiki fits better.
> This is what you aim for, right?
> 
> 
> 
> Sebastian
> 


I hope that you will not migrate the GuideXML inside the wiki, because it's so simple to write documentations inside a wiki and right now the unofficial Gentoo Wiki is clean and simple.

If you want to have registered users and contributors, then you need to use a standard syntaxe wiki.

Sylvain aka d2_racing

 		 	   		  
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Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Sebastian Pipping]

On 04/04/10 02:11, Sylvain Alain wrote:
> I hope that you will not migrate the GuideXML inside the wiki, because
> it's so simple to write documentations inside a wiki and right now the
> unofficial Gentoo Wiki is clean and simple.
> 
> If you want to have registered users and contributors, then you need to
> use a standard syntaxe wiki.

I didn't plan to, no.

On a side not please only quote parts of mails that you actually refer
to.  It means less scrolling and better context for everybody.



Sebastian