On Saturday 26 April 2008, Chris Dolan wrote:
> Shlomi,
>
> I skimmed the existing timeline and my first impression was "ugh".
> There's a lot a stuff that's unrelated to Perl ("Steven Jobs and
> Steven Wozniak found Apple Computer") and overly opinionated details
> ("Microsoft infec^H^H^Htroduces Windows to the world."). But once I
> read on further I realized that this document is quite valuable as it
> has a ton of relevant information and links. I think it's a great
> idea to update this document and I applaud your initiative. It does
> seem like a hard task, though.
Yes.
>
> To share the work, what do you think about moving it to the wiki? Or
> at least making the working copy be on the wiki with a "release" HTML
> version pulled off periodically (with a link back to the wiki)?
I thought about it too. The question is naturally whether we want to use the
MediaWiki-based http://perl.net.au/ or the Socialtext-based "Official Perl 5
Wiki" ( http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?perl_5_wiki ). But we
may need to clear the legalities first, and see if we can put stuff that's
restricted commercially (as is the case for the existing timeline) there. If
Elaine would relicense it under a more permissive licence, that would
certainly help, but I was unable to contact her so far (though I haven't
tried very hard).
Assuming the legalities can be overcome, converting it to a wiki page is
probably a good idea. However, in my history of contributing to wikis and the
wikimedia wikis I've ran into several wiki'ing anti-patterns that made
contributing to wikis much less pleasant than I'd like. I can elaborate, but
it may be off-topic here. I suppose most of you are familiar with some of
them.
This is regardless of the "Too many cooks spoil the broth" issue[1] that we
may encounter in a wiki.
In any case, I first want to get the legal status of the document cleared
before we wikify it.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
[1] - one thing I read about it and made me laugh is that "If a million
Shakespeares had to write together, they would write like a monkey.", which
is a variation on what Steven Wright once said (
http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/stevenwr.htm ). One must be careful when
applying it, though.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
Rethinking CPAN - http://xrl.us/bjn7p
The bad thing about hardware is that it sometimes work and sometimes doesn't.
The good thing about software is that it's consistent: it always does not
work, and it always does not work in exactly the same way.
