I've done a bit of work on the vimtips wiki at Google the last few days,
and it's come to my attention that it isn't really designed to do what
we want it to do. The Google wiki is designed to be used by a small
number of people working on a particular open source project. It is not
designed to be editable by hundreds (or possibly thousands) of users to
exchange tips on using an application.
The basic bottleneck is that only "project members" can edit the wiki,
meaning that these will be the only people who can add or edit tips.
The only way to become a project member is to have a project admin (so
far, me) visit the project's admin interface and add him or her. There
is no web interface or other functionality in place to do this in a more
automated way.
This awkward user-registration process will most certainly keep people
from contributing or updating tips. It will also create a lot of
tedious and error-proned work for the project's admins, even if I were to
add a dozen more.
So as I see it, we have two things we need to do if we want to keep the
wiki conversion project moving:
1. Define our wiki requirements
* Do we want anonymous users to be able to contribute at all like
they can on vim.org/tips today?
* Does the wiki have to be hosted by Google, or is it ok if we move
to another wiki host if they match all of our requirements?
* This question is probably mostly for Bram, since he first
suggested the Google wiki.
* I personally really like Google in general. They just don't
have the apps that we need today.
* Cost?
* I'm assuming that the ideal number if free :)
* Embedded WYSIWYG editor, etc.
2. Choose the wiki host that best suits our needs
* I see two options:
* Wait for Google to meet all of our requirements?
* Google recently acquired JotSpot, so maybe that wiki will
be functional enough to meet all of our requirements
some day.
* Find a different wiki host that does meet all of our
requirements, and should be able to do so for at least 3
years or so.
So what do you guys think?
Tom Purl
