On Tuesday 03 Aug 2004 16:11, William wrote: > Whether or not a Wiki goes stale is surely a function of its > audience rather than of the Wiki technology itself.
Well, not entirely. My problem with wiki technology is that it doesn't solve most of the problems I have with information management, which are generally to do with finding things and avoiding duplication. Or rather, any solutions to these problems are dependent on very heavy usership to be practical (i.e. the principle that the organisation of the wiki evolves towards ideal as a consequence of many minor changes). > As an example of a healthy Wiki, the Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org is > an excellent encyclopedia which is used regularly by thousands of > "real" people Yes, but that's the "fallacy of atypical example". Wikipedia is successful because it's the biggest and most popular instance on the Web of something that translates pretty immediately into wiki terms (note that an encyclopaedia is already structurally very much like a wiki, the wiki just adds links and the "open-source" part). It's pretty much guaranteed to be a great success so long as enough well-meaning people participate. Yet if I were to start another wiki encyclopaedia now, it would fail, because there is already Wikipedia. The success of Wikipedia says very little for or against the success of wikis in general, just as the success of Google says very little about the commercial viability of other websites. > I wrote a very > short page on Rosegarden at the Alsa Wiki > http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=rosegarden It's still waiting to be > improved and extended. Isn't that, then, in theory an example against wikis? You could have posted a webpage with exactly the same result. A wiki may be a decent way to put our existing documentation online, that's true. After all, we _haven't_ posted a webpage with it anyway. But the question is how far this stuff actually wants to be online? Is it a good thing to make some of our text files that are frankly now so out-of-date as to be misleading more readily available? Chris ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now, one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
