On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
<roz...@geekspace.com> wrote:
> A counter to your counter: One of the reasons that `using a modern
> version control system as the data store is intriguing' is that there
> are additional user-visible features afforded by it.
Checking out and branching and running your own distributed copies
of things, etc., is cool and all, but it seems like a solution in
search of a problem. The essentials of the wiki way are:
* Simple
* Anyone can edit
* Just edit the web page
* Plain text, human-friendly markup that resembles the rendered output
* No special software needed
* Minimal knowledge needed
* Simple
I've noticed that I often whenever I'm talking to programmers about
wikis, I often get remarks along the lines of "X is cool because it's
written in Y". While I can envision scenarios were implementation
might actually matter, they're corner cases. For most cases, you want
something that works well for the wiki users/editors, and don't care
about implementation.
MediaWiki is written in PHP, which is neither a "cool" nor a
"clean" language. I'm told the MW code can be quite hairy in places.
But in terms of actually doing collaborative editing, MediaWiki beats
everything else I've ever tried, hands down. Trial by fire on one of
the world's busiest websites has a tendency to hammer out working
solutions rather than "cool" ones. MW has been doing history, diff,
and merge since before Bazaar even existed. They're precisely
tailored to being good wiki tools.
I tried to take a look at Wikkid, to compare, but I couldn't
actually find a wiki using it.
I do note that Wkkid's mission seems to be "Create a wiki using
Bazaar". I generally dislike projects which are born from "Create an
X implemented using Y". That's just the wrong way to go about
something, IMNSHO. An effort should have a goal, and then pick the
tools which are best suited to the task. Starting with the tools is
putting the cart before the horse. Such efforts tend to be more
focused on the purity of the tools than on actually being a good X.
Looking at your others posts, I'd have to say that's the track
you're on. You're all about the revision control system, and don't
care if it's actually a good wiki or not. You haven't even used it.
I think that pretty much proves my argument.
Flame on.
-- Ben
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