Wiki latest

[Grunff]

First, sorry to clutter up the newsgroup with wiki discussion for those who are not interested, but at the moment we don't have anywhere else to discuss it (but hopefully will at the end of this message!).

Given that far more people seem in favour of MediaWiki than DokuWiki, and that DokuWiki appears somewhat broken at the moment (it just shouldn't be possible to break it by pasting in content, but that's just what happened), I suggest we remove DokuWiki and stick with MediaWiki, accessible at:

given that very few people seem interested in WordPress, I suggest we remove that also.

Unless I get any loud "no" shouts, I intend to remove DW and WP tomorrow. This will leave us with just MW.

I will leave MW up there for now, and see how things go over the next couple of months. If the content continues to build, and there are no complaints, I'll leave it up permanently.

Any suggestions for changes to the wiki are welcome, but I please keep those discussions to some suitable place on the wiki, and not on the newsgroup.

Does this sound ok to everyone, or does anyone have any problems with any of it? Feel free to air your concerns here, or drop me an email (it is valid).

[meow2222]

Sounds perfect. Thanks for the work you've put in and for hosting it. Gives me an excuse to frivol my time away while recovering.

NT

[Grunff]

You're welcome - I do think this could be very useful, but I can also see potential problems :-)

You frivol away, I won't let the data be lost.

[meow2222]

heh. I'm sure there are problems with everything in life.

NT

[John Rumm]

Personally I liked the idea of that... however if there are fewer in favour of that then I will go with the concensus.

Sounds ok to me. Not had much of a chance to play with any of this over the last few days, but will investigate more shortly when (I hope) there is some spare time.

[Grunff]

So did I, and I still have reservations about a wiki.

Many of the most recently created pages simply contain links to periodproperty.co.uk. This is clearly not in the spirit of a wiki, and is precisely the kind of thing that will get the wiki removed quite quickly.

Excellent, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

[Owain]

It's only a means of collaboratively editing FAQ pages. It's up to you and the FAQ maintainers to decide who gets editing permissions.

Or those pages removed, and The Person Concerned, and I think we all know Who He Is, told off.

uk.food+drink.misc have a thwapper for miscreants; what would be a suitable uk.d-i-y implement?

Lots of spare time over the next couple of days ;-(

Owain

[Owain]

It's only a means of collaboratively editing FAQ pages. It's up to you and the FAQ maintainers to decide who gets editing permissions.

Or those pages removed, and The Person Concerned, and I think we all know Who He Is, told off.

uk.food+drink.misc have a thwapper for miscreants; what would be a suitable uk.d-i-y implement?

Lots of spare time over the next couple of days ;-(

Owain

[meow2222]

Eh? There is plenty of offsite content relevant to us. Or do you not think the articles relevant to diy? I dont know. Do people not want offsite content linked to? If so a lot of useful stuff has to go.

It would be quite a task to completely rewrite all offsite articles so they can be posted on the wiki - but its upto everyone not just me.

NT

[Grunff]

There's nothing wrong with linking to content elsewhere, that's a good thing. But having large numbers of articles that contain nothing but a link to another site, like:

?title=Earth_Buildings_%26_Their_Repair?title=Wood_Finishing_Guide quite contradictory to the purpose of the wiki. You just end up with a site that is largely an index for another site.

[meow2222]

Its your wiki, so if you let us all know any areas like this that youre not happy with then we can avoid problems before they crop up.

There are 65 articles so far, and sure those 5 are all on one site. I might be wrong but I assumed there would be a number of sites which would already have a number of good articles on - in fact ISTR a site somewhere about woodwork that had a huge list of articles, lots of which would be great content for the wiki. And likely all of which cant be pasted in due to copyright.

I realise links offsite arent the best way to present info in a wiki, but at the moment we either link to useful content or dont have it. If the Wiki runs long term I would expect the existence of these links would prompt various people, at random times, to rewrite the content and put it into the wiki, so probably most link-only articles would become what we want them to eventually be. My thinking is that without the links initially, many of the subjects linked to would quite likely not get written about.

I see a link-only article as a) the information is there, albeit not well presented, maximising the wiki's use quickly b) they would tend to serve as motivation for people to contribute to present the informtaion in better ways c) Hopefully most such links would end up as mature wiki articles

The Part P article/stub is perhaps an example of this where a little wiki writing has already begun.

Maybe we all need to be clear on a policy re link articles, especially as in early days there is bound to be a large amount of content worthy of linking to, probably more content than has already been written for wiki articles.

NT

[Grunff]

Not at all, that's not how I see it. It isn't my wiki, it belongs to everyone who contributes. If most people are happy with something, then I'm happy with it.

I don't wish to be deciding policies. I'd be happier to just see how things develop over the next couple of months. I don't intend to make any decisions contrary to what appears to be majority opinion.

[Lobster]

So is that what's going to happen, to stop vandalism/edit wars etc (ie, editing permissions doled out) rather than free-for-all like Wikipedia? Has this been decided?

David