I think before lots of people spend lots of time entering content (as I said, this content will be preserved, but read on anyway) we ought to make some decisions. I think the discussion we've had so far has been quite fragmented and inconclusive.
So far, it seems more people are in favour of a wiki. That's fine. It also seems that some (but certainly not many) of those who favour a wiki would like some level of edit control.
The other issue is navigation. It would appear that other wiki systems, such as DokuWiki, are better for categorising articles than MediaWiki. Since this has been universally acknowledged as an important feature, should we perhaps look at DokuWiki as an alternative? I was planning to install one to play with today.
page mentioned above, as an experiment; but if you click on the 'Cable organising' hotlink in NT's link above, you end up with a blank page. However, the bit wot I wrote is definitely there, at the following link:
And the only place I could actually find this myself on the wiki site was to go into the "Recent changes" page at: - AFAICS there seems to be no contents or index link to look at or browse. Is that something which needs adding later, along with a 'structure'?
David
I'd be interested to play with another wiki, but I also think there's something to be said for the familiarity of mediawiki since so many wikis use it. But who knows; docuwiki's look'n'feel may be close enough to mediawiki's that it's not a problem.
It seems to be case sensitive: putting title=Cable_organising and title=Cable_Organising in the URL give different results.
I suggest that we need some editorial policies and style guidelines and a subject hierarchy before people start putting up masses of stuff.
This _could_ be really good, like Wikipedia, but not if people put up worthless pages like "Monkey" and "Part_P".
Yup, and see if there's an HTML import filter to get the existing FAQ in.
We were only playing ...
Owain
The index is incorrect, the article has a lower case o.
I would say edit the article title, but that doesn't seem to be possible, so I guess the index needs changing.
Steve
I'll be interested to see what it does that mediawiki doesnt. Its good to see several people are already creating content, that can be ported to wherever whenever if necessary.
For now mediawiki has a Contents page, and each article can be listed there.
NT
You have to work out what you're going to do about copyright and attributions in the Wiki, before you can do that. Depending on what's decided (and possibly on what the Wiki can do), it may or may not be possible to bring all/part of the existing FAQ in.
I think you can move it
I would argue that the Wiki and the FAQ should remain separate anyway. It should be up to the individual authors of FAQ content if they want to maintain the content on both the FAQ and the Wiki.
Wiki pages can always link to it or redirect to it.
NT
More wiki pages up:
NT
Well you guys seem to be having a good time working out the fine details of setting up this data source. I wouldn't worry about the fact that only a couple of you are discussing it - the finer details are a bit arcane for the rest of us I suspect.
Suffice to say that a quick dip into the DIYWIKI shows it to be just what I hoped it would be - an encyclopedia of DIY related info that solves those basic questions that one is too embarrassed to ask !! I really hadn't sorted out the difference for instance between a heatbank and a thermal store.
Well done guys, a pat on the back and a nice sweety to you all.
Rob
Yes, that's a good way of starting out at least. Each part of the FAQ is effectively reviewed and approved by several people, and thus carries some weight of credibility behind it, and the maintainers we've had have all been trusted to keep it that way.
It's harder to see how a wiki can achieve the same status. I do contribute to one or two wikipedia pages. Fortunately, each of these seems to have someone who guards it like a hawk and removes garbage within an hour or so. They end up having to do this once or twice a week, although each incident is often repeated a few times in quick succession. I don't think we're big enough to have enough people doing this guarding and fixing process, so it would need some type of access permission to be granted for editing rights. Also, I wouldn't bother contributing if I had to waste my time having an edit war with drivel. Then there's the issue of who decides who can and cannot have access to edit the pages? All quite tricky issues.
Good points there, diversity is maybe the answer. So far we've got newsgroup, FAQ, wiki...
NT
Perhaps the usefulness is migrating the data from the wiki to a FAQ. I.e a subject or theme is selected the wiki gets contributions from everyone. When it has been well honed it's made into a useful FAQ?
Or are you saying that the open editing phase will only work if the wiki has guardian(s)?
From the older thread about CMS for the FAQ I notice Owain pointed out that ".. some parts of wikipedia have a 'captcha' anti-spam feature where you have to type the answer to a sum in a box."
Sounds useful and I can see that, since spam and vandalism is likely to be a problem for all wikis and wikis are becoming increasingly popular, we're going to see an arms race developing with Good Bots working to thwart the Bad Guys (and vice versa) as we currently have with blacklists and Bayesian filters for email. One can envision for instance a bot monitoring page changes and detecting edit wars or wholesale deletion or multilation of articles and flagging them (maybe via RSS feed to watchers) and automatically blocking perpetrators.
Not that this helps in the short term but maybe it helpsto realise that we are not alone in this and stick with trying to make as useful and open a resource as possible and only shutting things down (e.g.to registered users) when under attack, rather than by default.
I had always envisaged the wiki as being a method of creating FAQs that allowed collaborative editing without an overworked FAQ maintainer having to hard-code everything into HTML every time.
IMHO it could work quite well if the wiki articles were locked; a different article could be unlocked every month and would stimulate discussion on the group and a way of keeping the FAQ periodically reviewed and fresh.
Owain
Fortunately, each of these
I agree. I think it's obvious you'd have to have a username/password system for write-access to it; and that anyone who wants this should be given it (ie, without having to prove their credentials or something similar).
But they would get yanked if they misbehaved, and their IP address flagged... and therein lies the difficulty: who decides what constitutes "misbehaving" (other than obvious vandalism) and does the yanking?
David
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