Re: The Perl Wiki, or Perl-Wikipedia

On Saturday 08 July 2006 02:47, Eric R. Meyers wrote:
> Hi Shlomi,
>
> I'm very happy to get your response.  You two are the wiki experts, not me.
>
> On Friday 07 July 2006 17:47, you wrote:
> > Personally, I feel that putting the central Perl wiki within Wikipedia
> > may not be such a good idea. That's because Perl hackers may wish to
> > deviate somewhat from Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View. For example, the
> > Perl wiki may have an entry about Python, Ruby, Tcl, etc. with some
> > criticisms of their approaches of doing things.
>
> There is a correct time and a correct place for everything.  There are some
> things that are appropriate to be placed neutrally under the Perl topic
> within Wikipedia itself, and some are not, so we just need to organize and
> police things smartly, moderating the content as needed to make it public,
> while providing external links out to the proper private location, or
> locations, for the Perl biased expressions to occur.  No foul and no
> problem, I believe.

Right, but this will fragment the Perl central wiki. If people have to look in 
two different places, this would be confusing. I'd rather have one wiki and 
that's it.

>
> I also believe that a truly objective Perl person could legitimately write
> a factually valid and complete critique about the various programming
> languages, comparing "their approaches of doing things" without showing a
> bias toward any particular language, or languages.  

True, but see below.

> We just need to be very 
> fair, complete and moderate in what we do for the general public.  It's
> simply a difference between the formality of writing from "Wikipedia's
> Neutral Point of View" and someone quickly hacking out an expression of
> their Perl biased opinions in a more private Perl setting.

Yes, but I still believe that a Perl wiki may be somewhat different than a 
Perl section in the wikipedia.

>
> I think that the Wikibooks will also be very interesting to Perl people.
>

Indeed. There's already a beginning of a book there about learning Perl (and 
possibly some other book). My "Perl for Perl Newbies" lecture series:

http://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/Perl/Newbies/

Is released under the CC-Public-Domain, and parts of it or it entirely can be 
integrated into the Wikipedia or wikibooks.

> I still have a lot of research to do with the many other things that I've
> learned in the discussion that I've had with the people on foundation-l.
>

OK.

> > As I noted I believe Wikia may be more appropriate for it, because from
> > what I understood wikis there may be somewhat biased. Ask Bjorn Hansen
> > claimed he would rather wait for Socialtext to release their Open Source
> > wiki beta, which he'll set up in the perl.org domain, than to use TWiki
> > or MediaWiki. We may wish to be patient, and to use perl.net.au in the
> > meantime.
>
> Angela Beesley, from Wikia, notified me via email yesterday that she has
> setup http://perl.wikia.com and a [email protected] mailing list.  I have
> the administrative information to provide to you later.  I don't plan to do
> anything with these without our mutual agreement.  I don't own these, we
> do, and I'm always very fair, complete and moderate with people.

First of all - thanks. We'll have to see what we do about it in regards to the 
already exists perl.net.au. Perhaps we can get Ask Bjoern Hansen to point 
http://mediawiki.perl.org/ (or http://mw.perl.org/ or whatever) at either 
place. 

In the meantime, I'll add stuff that I find appropriate to 
http://perl.net.au/. I've already subscribed to their wiki-wide RSS feed.

>
> I've no problem with your call for patience, and I was just beginning to do
> my own research, asking my own questions and expressing my own ideas.

Well, I don't know about the Socialtext wiki and how compatible it is with 
MediaWiki, but it does sound interesting. I suggest that we don't wait for it 
to be released and for a central wiki based on it to materialise, and instead 
start working on http://perl.net.au/.

Note that the http://perl.net.au/ admins may wish to move the contents (and 
history) of the wiki over to http://perl.wikia.com/ in order to relieve the 
burden of the administration. But it's their decision not mine.

Best Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish      [email protected]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the
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