Re: Updating http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html

On Apr 26, 2008, at 12:28 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> On Saturday 26 April 2008, Chris Dolan wrote:
>> To share the work, what do you think about moving it to the wiki?  Or
>> at least making the working copy be on the wiki with a "release" HTML
>> version pulled off periodically (with a link back to the wiki)?
>
> I thought about it too. The question is naturally whether we want  
> to use the
> MediaWiki-based http://perl.net.au/ or the Socialtext-based  
> "Official Perl 5
> Wiki" ( http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi? 
> perl_5_wiki ). But we
> may need to clear the legalities first, and see if we can put stuff  
> that's
> restricted commercially (as is the case for the existing timeline)  
> there. If
> Elaine would relicense it under a more permissive licence, that would
> certainly help, but I was unable to contact her so far (though I  
> haven't
> tried very hard).
>
> Assuming the legalities can be overcome, converting it to a wiki  
> page is
> probably a good idea. However, in my history of contributing to  
> wikis and the
> wikimedia wikis I've ran into several wiki'ing anti-patterns that made
> contributing to wikis much less pleasant than I'd like. I can  
> elaborate, but
> it may be off-topic here. I suppose most of you are familiar with  
> some of
> them.
>
> This is regardless of the "Too many cooks spoil the broth" issue[1]  
> that we
> may encounter in a wiki.
>
> In any case, I first want to get the legal status of the document  
> cleared
> before we wikify it.

Ahh, I mistakenly truncated my point.  I mentioned the advantage of  
sharing the workload, but the main point I meant to make was that in  
a wiki it becomes more obvious how to contribute and the  
disappearance of an author is not a problem.  Wikis normally have a  
contributor license that is amenable to moving forward with the work.

I prefer MediaWiki personally (the state of the art in web-based rich  
text editing is lacking, IMO), but the "Official"-ness of the  
SocialText-based wiki makes it a better choice.

Yes, I agree that the best first step is to clarify the license.

With respect to "Too many cooks", I agree.  Given the lack of  
contributors to the P5 wiki, I doubt that's a real problem  
here.  :-)  But, yes, with too many contributors it would be hard to  
keep the history at a consistent level of detail.

Chris