On Apr 26, 2008, at 12:28 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
On Saturday 26 April 2008, Chris Dolan wrote:
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.
Ahh, I mistakenly truncated my point. I mentioned the advantage of
sharing the workload, but the main point I meant to make was that in
a wiki it becomes more obvious how to contribute and the
disappearance of an author is not a problem. Wikis normally have a
contributor license that is amenable to moving forward with the work.
I prefer MediaWiki personally (the state of the art in web-based rich
text editing is lacking, IMO), but the "Official"-ness of the
SocialText-based wiki makes it a better choice.
Yes, I agree that the best first step is to clarify the license.
With respect to "Too many cooks", I agree. Given the lack of
contributors to the P5 wiki, I doubt that's a real problem
here. :-) But, yes, with too many contributors it would be hard to
keep the history at a consistent level of detail.
Chris
