Hi Mark and David,
I agree with the points you make. The change was rather abrupt but in
the long term I believe the dekiwiki will be a much better and useful
platform.
The dekiwiki has been initially developed on top of mediawiki with the
aim to make it more user friendly to modify content, e.g. using a
WYSIWYG editor etc. It has very powerful scripting capabilities (using
dekiscript) and a lot of useful extensions that make it possible to
mash-up all sorts of content. You can easily embed videos and RSS feeds,
view PDF/DOC/XLS/PS/RTF documets, SVG images or interface with
tweeter/linkedin/skype(?) etc.
It is basically mediawiki on steroids!
Not that all of this is needed for this website but providing a rich
platform will give the Gromacs community much more flexibility in
sharing knowledge and experience. Tutorial videos, RSS feeds to sites of
interest, current weather in Stockholm, etc. can enrich the site by a lot.
I would have approached this process differently. The MediaWiki
content was intrinsically free-form, and now we're apparently trying
to shoehorn it into something hierarchical. This process converts
hundreds of links that are now defunct because they were created as
relative links to targets in a free-form database, and have now been
automatically converted to what look like hard links to non-existent
targets. The correct targets are presumably placed somewhere in a
fairly arbitrary hierarchy (e.g. what's the difference between "Best
Practices" and "How-tos"?), which anyone wanting to spend the time to
fix now has to memorise. These categories existed in the previous
wiki, but nobody adding content or links was forced to use or know
them. That's a big change in philosophy.
In fact, dekiwiki can be very easily set up as a graph/free-form style
wiki. One just has to disable the navigation pane, one click away. Then
you have only one page from which you can access the rest of the site.
Also, in a wiki way, if you try to access a non-existing page you are
automatically presented with the editor to add new page to the top level.
Hyperlinks to other pages on the site are also relative as in a standard
wiki, so even if you rename a page or move it to a different level in
the tree (if you are using one) all links pointing to it will be able to
find it.
I've spent a lot of time over years creating and maintaining a large
slab of this content (with other notable contributions from quite a
few people - Dallas Warren in particular) and feel that this new
imported format greatly reduces the utility of the information. While
some curated hierarchical indexes are good things for helping to find
content, I think preserving the underlying lack of hierarchy is a
much better approach to preserving the usefulness of the content. The
alternative is appointing a curator and having them spend lots of
time organizing and fixing links. Given the slow rate of transition
of GROMACS web content from old to new forms, I think we should be
very keen not to make more centralized work, and to preserve the
goodwill of previous "external" volunteers :-)
I can easily remove the left pane and leave only a flat graph structure
if that's better. It wasn't easy to categories all the info from the
previous site but there is some inherent hierarchy in the type of
content we have on the site.
It is possible to combine both styles. How about keeping the tree and
put easily "categorizable" content into the appropriate level? Then,
have a top level "Others" (or something like that) where you can dump
any page that doesn't fit the structure, and include link to it from
another place.
Same would hold for levels like "How-tos" and "Programming Guide". They
can have 100s of sub-pages but you don't need to scroll down to find
something. Put a new page there along with a link to it at some other
page.
Last but not least, there is a search form:)
I'd much rather see the Documentation section
(http://www.gromacs.org/Documentation) have links to
* the paper manuals,
* either a compatible Wiki, or a flat wiki-style import of the
previous wiki (so that automated link conversion can just work - even
if it's done with a simple perl script!),
* some new and updated index pages for that previous wiki,
* and if necessary, any other non-wiki content.
Dear Mark,
you raise many good points. A lot of the strong points of the simple
wiki have been lost in the transition, I guess we have been misled by
the wiki in the name Dekiwiki. Dekiwiki has some important advantages
over mediawiki, like security (apparently the oldwiki was abused by
spammers recently, this is why it was shutdown), and the ease for
adding images and documents (mdp files :)). Whether dekiwki was the
right choice for the job I am not sure. Overall it is easy to conclude
that the move was done too hastily, seeing that the new website is
still not anywhere close as informative as the two previous websites
were.
Rossen has done a lot of hard work on the website (e.g. the mailing
list search), but there are some fundamental flaws like the lack of
indentation in the menu structure,
I think it's more of a feature than a bug. For example, by going down
just 3 sub-levels you'll start using up lots of screen space if you keep
all the indentations. Same holds for cropping long lists of sub-pages
which are at the same level. But I will look at that and see what can be
done.
and the excessive amount of menus which apparently are difficult to
change.
By modifying the skin you can remove most of the elements and leave it
pretty bare by default and display certain elements as needed, e.g. only
Contributors would see the "Edit Page" etc. icons. I will work on that also.
You correctly identify the most important point that is missing: the
self-organization that is inherent in the mediawiki format. I wonder
whether it is impossible to get that functionality on dekiwiki
(without that, one can not call it a wiki really...).
The goodwill of external volunteers is another point that should not
be overlooked. GROMACS is by now a community effort with many
developers and contributor, big and small, scattered around the globe.
To make the new website a success we do need many contributors, and we
should try not to alienate contributors by such abrupt changes.
Again, I can make the site to look and behave like the old wiki, but I'm
not sure this is a good idea.
Rossen
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