On Tuesday, 13 November 2012 at 14:51:58 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 11/13/12 3:23 AM, Thomas Koch wrote:
Tobias Pankrath proposed the github wiki engine (free
software[3]) and I
agreed that it would be best to just enable the wiki in a new
project at the
D github account[4].
In case you didn't catch the original thread, I also pointed out
there that switching from ProWiki to Gollum might be a case of
jumping from the frying pad into the fire. Gollum, the GitHub
wiki software, supports none of the useful features of common
Wiki software, such as search (!), comfortable history browsing,
talk pages, wach lists, permission control, etc. There are also a
couple of UI issues which make it less than ideal for larger
installations, like the fact that you can accidentally
change/break a page URL very easily by just editing the main
title box.
I suggested using MediaWiki instead, the same wiki engine used by
Wikipedia (familiarity bonus!) and many big open source
communities (Arch/Fedora/Gentoo/Suse, KDE, OpenOffice, Haskell,
…).
I think that's a great idea. I'm not a frequent user of our
Wiki, […]
You should be, just like all of us should. ;) I feel that way
too much of the fruits of our collective labor/discussions gets
lost in the fairly impenetrable newsgroups archives (for the
record, I'm only very infrequently contributing to the wiki as
well, mostly because of the annoyances already discussed).
The only thing we need to worry about is preserving links lest
Google search pagerank gets lost. Is it possible to keep the
old link convention?
Hardly, without owning prowiki.org. Also, I'm not even sure if
URLs like http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?GuiLibraries would
be a good candidate for keeping – I'd say, let's move to
http://wiki.dlang.org/GuiLibraries, and then work on keeping
that. Given that wiki4d never was immensely popular, I think we
can bear that change. In fact, I think the much bigger problem
compared to search engine ranking would be breaking
links/bookmarks. Maybe, moving to wiki.dlang.org would even lead
to a _better_ ranking on D-related topics.
Maybe Helmut Leitner would also be willing to set up to
http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/ 301-redirect to a landing page on the
new installation (which could in turn also redirect the user to
the appropriate page, if there is a page with a matching name).
This way, we could avoid both problems.
The only question raised by my suggestion is hosting. I don't
know what infrastructure dlang.org is hosted on right now, and if
running a MediaWiki instance on it would be possible. Given the
moderate amounts of traffic to expect, I don't think this should
be an insurmountable problem, though – heck, if it wouldn't
occasionally be unstable, I would even offer my own VPS (1 GB
RAM, reasonably fast CPU/disk).
David
