Randal's been asking why this Perl 5 Wiki will be successful when all the others weren't. If you're asking "I never knew about any other Perl wikis" -- yeah, exactly. I wrote up a response in private and he encouraged I share it.
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This wiki will work when others have failed, not because this
might be the Perl 5 wiki. Its because this *IS* *THE* Perl 5 wiki. The flag has
been planted on the high ground. We've got a visible domain name. Its backed by someone (me) with a mouth loud
enough to let everyone know and the force of personality and credibility to
sustain this fiat until it truly is so. And I know a lot of people want it to be so.
A wiki lives and dies by its contributors and content. In the early stages there is no content so the wiki is not useful. You have to whip up contributors to contribute to something which *in the future* will be useful. They have to be convinced the work is worthwhile and useful.
Now if there is doubt, maybe this wiki isn't the right place to put stuff.
Maybe the wiki will fail. Maybe someone else will start a competing wiki.
Then the early contributors will hesitate. Some will wait until there's some
content. If enough do there never will be content and it surely will collapse.
I intend to jump-start the content by hosting a wikithon at OSCON. Have a
bunch of people start off as many topics as they can, begin tracks of
discussion and content so that others can have a trail to follow and easy
tasks to do. Creating these pre-existing tracks eases new user's entry into
editing a visible, public wiki. I encourage local PM groups to do the same.
The wiki is hitching a ride on the "we need a list of recommended CPAN modules"
grumbling, which is always at a dull roar. It flamed up at YAPC this year. By
providing a place to put it the wiki can turn that discontent into positive
action and more contributions to the wiki.
About PerlNet. I looked at PerlNet. It has steady contributors and a lot of
content. I mulled simply crowning it the Perl 5 wiki, but its really the
Australian/NZ wiki and decided to leave it be. I'm talking with them now and
we're mulling what to do. One possibility is for the Perl 5 Wiki to absorb
all PerlNet's general Perl pages and have PerlNet just cross-link back to the
Perl 5 Wiki. Then PerlNet can focus on local content. Not sure what's going
to happen but rest assured they're involved and they seem quite happy that
someone's planted the Perl 5 Wiki flag.
The Perl 5 Wiki is only "my" wiki because I'm the one who finally got off
their ass and created it (or asked Kirsten to make it -- btw Kirsten is doing all the real work behind the scenes). After that the
playing field is level. Its a wiki, you have about as much control as I do.
Make it your wiki. Make it work.
Re:perlmonks
schwern on 2007-07-10T10:13:07
Perlmonks is a different beastie from a wiki and they are complimentary. David Nicol made a similar comment on p5p. Here's my response:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2007/07/msg126579.html
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Perlmonks has a nature similar to a mailing list. Its nice for asking
questions and having active discussions, but information scrolls off the top
of the screen and is forgotten. It is not set up to be browsed or for any
sort of permanence. Even if you link to a posting you often have to dig down
through the comments to find the actual solution with a minefield of
incomplete solutions scattered through the comments.
How the Perl 5 Wiki compliments Perlmonks is by providing the permanence.
Think of the sorts of questions that get asked over and over and over again on
Perlmonks. Let's just look at the front page...
Someone not understanding "use lib". Very common.
http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=625444
Here's someone asking about why return a reference to a hash rather than just
a hash.
http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=625374
Someone asking about grabbing sound card input from Perl. Wouldn't it be nice
to point him at the list of recommended CPAN modules for multimedia?
http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=625345
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?Recommended%20Multimedia%20Modules
Here's yet another person not understanding permissions failure when
installing CPAN modules.
http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=625307
The wiki can ask as a place to put pages for FAQ-like information. After
Perlmonks has hammered out a good solution for a given common question they
can post the problem and answer on the wiki.You are omitting other sections
Limbic Region on 2007-07-10T12:58:15
"Perlmonks has a nature similar to a mailing list. Its nice for asking questions and having active discussions, but information scrolls off the top of the screen and is forgotten."I agree with this 100%. You have to be an addicted fiend to really keep track of what goes on there even with the Newest Nodes and Recently Active Threads sections.
"It is not set up to be browsed or for any sort of permanence."Here is where I begin to disagree with you. Some of the sections are intended to be like described above while others are not. For instance, Categorized Questions and Answers as well as Tutorials.
I am not trying to make an argument that PerlMonks negates the need for a Perl Wiki. I am just trying to make your characterization of the site more accurate. I agree that they fill complimentary needs.
For those who are reading this who think I forgot Super Search, I intentionally didn't bring it up. Searching is not the same as "browsing" or "navigating" a site for information. While they both may bring you to the right information, the experience is completely different.
Missed opportunity
btilly on 2007-07-10T15:03:41
So you think your wiki will complement perlmonks. Maybe so.
But you missed an opportunity to help that to happen.
If you stand around and say, "I think that my wiki will complement perlmoonks", then people from perlmonks will look at your wiki, say "that's useless, I'll think about it later", and continue on posting on perlmonks. As they go they'll continue to refer to useful nodes from perlmonks,
The end result is that perlmonks will continue to gain useful content faster than your wiki, and nobody on perlmonks will wind up being directed to your wiki. Which means that perlmonks will continue to be more effective than your wiki at being a wiki (for experienced perlmonks people), and you'll not get traffic.
What is a more useful alternative?
Try to get someone who is interested (it won't be me, but it could be you) to follow perlmonks for a while. As you see old perlmonks nodes get referred to, go to those nodes, copy the content to the wiki, then post a reply on perlmonks thanking the poster for referring you to that node, and saying where it was added on the perl wiki.
You will have succeeded when people start referring to articles on the perl wiki on perlmonks, when other people start spontaneously copying information from perlmonks to the wiki, and when people on perlmonks start offering as standard advice that people look on the wiki.
In short, if you want to succeed, it will be very helpful to have perlmonks and your wiki cooperate. So have a vision for how that cooperation will happen, and start making it so. Otherwise it won't happen on its own, and you'll find yourself competing with perlmonks rather than cooperating.Re:Missed opportunity
Qiang on 2007-07-10T17:29:13
i disgree.
perlmonks mostly is a forum. it is hard to track what is going on. there are too many nodes and many replies. information is fly by quickly and you usually get a piece of it here and there. sure, there is the tutorial section which help in some degree. but it has no comparison to what wiki offers.
with wiki, it is easy to start a page and get people contribute it. infomation is easier to categoried and be found.
take the 'recommended modules' for example, how do you do it in perlmonks? i can see with a bunch of threads that many people vote for different module, how do you gather the info? with wiki, people can put the info to the right place from the beginning. less housekeeping and anyone can do the housekeeping.Re:Missed opportunity
btilly on 2007-07-10T18:23:20
I agree with you on the characteristics of a wiki versus perlmonks. However anyone who is active on perlmonks has learned to find their way to lots of useful information there. (They keep it in home nodes, they remember titles, use search, etc.) And in answering questions, time and time again you'll find answers where they post links to that useful information.
The result is that there is a lot more useful content to refer people to on perlmonks than on this wiki. And for people who are experienced on perlmonks it is easier to find that. Furthermore since most of the answers on perlmonks are given people who are experienced there, there are constant references there that help people find their way about.
Ironically it is also easier to find your way to the knowledge that you need on perlmonks if you don't know your way around. Why? Because you just ask, and someone tells you. On a wiki it is much harder since you need to understand your problem well enough to know what to look for. On perlmonks people will draw the connection between what you want and what you are searching for for you. (Admittedly at some annoyance cost in some cases.)
Now I agree that a wiki is much better in many ways. If a wiki wasn't better, then my suggested strategy would never work - there would be no point in copying useful content from perlmonks into a wiki. However if someone got a usable amount of content on the wiki, and if people got directed there often enough, then the benefits of the wiki would cause people who come in through perlmonks to refer to the wiki as a resource. But you'll have a hard time establishing that dynamic if you don't find ways to get perlmonks people to cooperate with creating content on the wiki.Perlmonks and Perl wiki sitting in a tree
schwern on 2007-07-10T22:32:04
You're right, if Perlmonks starts cross-linking to the wiki that'll be a huge boost.
I'm not the person to do it, as I gag on web forums. Maybe I can con Ovid into doing it.
POD on the wiki?
schwern on 2007-07-11T01:10:02
I've been trying to blaze lots of paths in the wiki for people to follow to avoid the "blank page" problem. Right now if you're not sure go ahead and post it. I've added some more general guidelines to the front page.
As for using the wiki to edit man pages, its not quite the place for it. Two reasons: One, the format. We write documentation in POD. ST uses something else. We could write the pages in POD, but then they wouldn't display correctly thus taking away one of the advantages of a wiki. We could write them in ST markup, but then there's extra work to be done each time the author wants to pull the latest version off the wiki. Maybe you could write some sort of translator.
Two, the syncing. Pure POD can live on a wiki and the author can just copy the text from the wiki into their repository. But most POD lives along side code. And code changes a lot. And a wiki is not a good place to be editing the code. So there's a syncing problem as the POD changes on the wiki and the code and POD changes in the repository. Messy.
Fortunately, there is a solution: PodWiki Yes, a wiki that uses POD for its markup. That solves the formatting problem. Each page is just a file sitting on disk. It could, with a little work, use an existing checkout to commit changes directly into a repository (probably to a branch). That solves the syncing problem.
That 'little bit of work' is to make PodWiki::Revision speak SVN. Currently it only speaks to RCS, but PodWiki::Revision is already nicely abstracted to delegate to an RCS object. A small amount of work would allow it to use an SVN object instead.
Re:POD on the wiki?
sigzero on 2007-07-11T18:26:19
I am not sure why you mentioned POD as I did not. DBI is using another wiki (tiddywiki) to get the FAQ up-to-date and help to encourage the DBD authors as well. If this would be a better thing to put on yours so be it.
PodWiki seems pretty cool and easy. I wonder why it isn't used more?Re:POD on the wiki?
schwern on 2007-07-11T21:03:26
Oh, I just assumed that the DBI faq was in POD. My bad. In that case, if you think it'll help get the FAQ worked on, bring it on over.
As for PodWiki, like many cool things out there many people just don't know about it.Re:POD on the wiki?
sigzero on 2007-07-12T01:27:56
I sure didn't know about it and POD makes for a pretty good markup format.
I'm the founder and one of the admins of PerlNet. For what it's worth, my thoughts on PerlNet and the Perl 5 Wiki can be found in my use.perl journal.
Executive summary: The Perl 5 Wiki has my support.
We "seeded" the wiki for Hackathon Toronto in April 2007 and it proved useful. I recommend that for both permanent wikis like the Perl 5 wiki as well as event-based wikis.I intend to jump-start the content by hosting a wikithon at OSCON. Have a bunch of people start off as many topics as they can, begin tracks of discussion and content so that others can have a trail to follow and easy tasks to do. Creating these pre-existing tracks eases new user's entry into editing a visible, public wiki.
