Wiki - moving, restructuring, markup changes

The github wiki could be transferred to mediawiki by translating the markdown to mediawiki markup via for example pandoc

I fetched it via git and will pratice that. And post my results here.

This thread can also a little bit be seen as a continuation of http://loom.io/discussions/626

and to outsource the wiki topic from the diasporaproject discussion and plans

Did we vote and choose mediawiki? Everything is moving very fast now :)

Just hacking and wanted to let you know about. Mediawiki was not decided on yet. Even if I just pretend it was.

Yes, I think experimenting is fine Dr. Groove, but I think we are moving a little fast before we do business of more organization.

I am not so sold on wikis, but I could be persuaded. Regardless, that should not stop someone from doing a wiki.

It seems to me that having a forum and then extracting nuggets from the forum to the wiki might be a way to go. I don't know. Just a thought.

@md - As I hoped for a year or longer some people would group together and decide on another wiki or doc platform - I would describe our moving speed as slow albeit increasing... :)

@Dr. Groove, I mean of course here at the Loom. Not since a year ago! :)

yep understand - , just need to note: I like what's going on, ... It's quite amazing - and: sometimes hacking is preferrable to discussing.

@madamephilo I think a wiki definitely has advantages for documentation. Anyone can edit a wiki, even if you don't know the markup syntax, Search "wikipedia cheatsheet" on any search engine and you'll get a quick overview of how to edit any MediaWiki powered site.

Because anyone can edit a wiki, the documentation can grow and evolve over time as the software and the community evolve and grow. Since most wiki software also keeps a public record of who made what edits, everyone gets credit for their work and everyone can be held accountable for their actions. This has worked great for online encyclopedias (Wikipedia), dictionaries (Wiktionary) and many large and small FOSS documentation projects.

I do like the idea of also having a forum and extracting information from the forum to the wiki. I think that's a much more reasonable way to maintain certain types of documents (especially FAQs) than what most forums do.. a sticky post that's constantly being edited with no real record of what those edits were. :)

@Steven: I'm glad you like the idea of a forum to hash things out and then the best of breed being exported (by a real person editor) into a wiki.

My only concern about a wiki is that it be kept updated, and that it not be centric to coders. I think a lot of technical documentation is fine to leave on github.

Seems like things are going fast and furious though! I guess that is a good thing?

Being a wiki that anyone can edit, and being separate from GitHub (where, for the most part, only developers and a small group of non-developers are registered.. for obvious reasons), means there's a good chance that the documentation will be kept up to date because the entire community has access to it. It also means that people are more likely to be able to write whatever documentation (technical or non-technical) that they think is useful.

Again I'll use Wikipedia as an example, obviously the site has rules, standards and admins.. but anyone who chooses to sign up and create an account (they don't even require you to give your email address, just a name or pseudonym and a password) is an editor. Thanks to that freedom, there's a community of thousands of editors who do a pretty good job of keeping the site up to date. For example, within minutes of the announcement that Lance Armstrong was being stripped of his Tour de France victories, the Lance Armstrong page on wikipedia had a tag at the top of the page that said that the page references current events and may be changing frequently (or something to that effect, I don't remember the exact wording) and was updated to reflect what was happening at the time.