On 2/2/07, Tim Sweetman wrote:
Where are the articles describing what kwiki is, what kwiki does? There
are maybe one or two, but they're (a) several years old, and (b) written
by Ingy.
Well, if the product documentation is sufficient to actually use, what would
be the purpose of such an article, and how would it differ from the
documentation?
I think there aren't many articles because people heard about it, decided to
use it, found that it worked exactly as advertised, and wasn't so
complicated to use that it needed articles written about it.
Maybe there is some sort of Perl Journal (hint, hint) or something that
publishes articles about Perl modules and someone might submit an article
about Kwiki. Can someone talk Alligator Descartes or BDF or maybe Andy
Lester (see below) or some other well-known contributor to those sorts of
publications to contribute an article on Kwiki?
I found this on the Feb 2005 issue of TPJ:
Phalanx Marches On
Andy Lester has reorganized his Phalanx project, an effort to add tests to
CPAN modules, find hidden bugs, and improve documentation. When his initial
group of 12 testers, each working alone, failed to produce any additional
tests, Andy decided to make the project more community-oriented. A web site
has been put up at http://qa.perl.org/phalanx/; a wiki has been organized at
http://phalanx.kwiki.org/; and a perl-qa list is hosted at lists.perl.org.
And this one by Andy Lester in May 2004:
Wikis
The OSCON wiki was a huge success. A wiki is a web-based hypertext
information store that lets anyone modify pages on the fly. The wiki was
created weeks before the start of the convention, and was updated by
literally hundreds of users. Some contributed only their names to the list
of attendees, while others maintained elaborate lists of Birds-of-a-Feather
sessions. It became the electronic equivalent of a bulletin board, but far
more interactive.
Brian Ingerson has become quite an evangelist for wikis. His CGI::Kwiki has
made a convert out of me, now that I've seen it in action. He's also created
Test::Fit, for integrating Perl's testing framework into a wiki based on the
Fit testing framework.
CGI::Kwiki: http://search.cpan.org/dist/CGI-Kwiki/
OSCON wiki: http://oscon.kwiki.org
Fit: http://fit.c2.com/
But neither the phalanx or oscon projects would show up in the google search
that EM referenced, since it excludes the entire kwiki.org domain. Maybe
Ingy should look into moving the "Kwiki farm" sites off of kwiki.org and
maybe onto kwiki.net? That might result in a google search that returned
more "notable" results.
The old locations could all be redirected with some simple mod_rewrite
directives, and then get Google to index the new site locations.
... but that's only on the web as email archive, and it's written by
Ingy! ("Notable" seems to mean "thought notable by people other than its
creators")
And apparently also "as agreed to by the page editor"
Wiki software that is in wide use, or does anything
particularly special, which has been documented somewhere on the web or
in other literature which can be cited, not by its chief developer,
would be noteable, yes?
And kwiki is mentioned on many "wiki engine software" lists and
cross-reference sites.
On the other hand, plenty of Perl programmers zone out if you start
talking about Spiffy (http://cpanratings.perl.org/dist/Spiffy). This
stuff is very, very, very specialised.
OK, I see your point. But then again, so are articles like this one on the
Hubble FGS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Guidance_Sensor ).
Yeah, infrastructure is hard, and yes, it is specialized.
But when you get it right, it's pure craft in action.
But that doesn't stop loads of content (good and bad) being put on the net
about other infrastructure projects that do strange and magical things with
a programming language ( e.g. Java and Groovy, or DHTML, JavaScript and
AJAX, or Ruby and Rails).
Mike808/
P.S. -- sorry to Tim since you're getting this twice.
--
sed '/^[when][coders]/!d
/^...[discover].$/d
/^..[real].[code]$/!d
' /usr/share/dict/words
