[ZWeb] proposal: one Zope wiki

[Jeffrey P Shell]

On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 05:39  AM, Sidnei da Silva wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 12:07:31PM +1100, Adrian van den Dries wrote:
> | quoth Simon Michael:
> |
> | > Right. I advocate a single central zope wiki on zope.org. This 
> would be
> | > the default catch-all wiki and jumping-off point, free-form 
> encyclopaedia,
> | > etc. for all things zope. Although new scalability issues will 
> need to be
> | > dealt with when it grows very large, a single large wiki will be 
> more
> | > useful and more attractive to maintain than the current confusing
> | > proliferation of zope wikis in random locations with duplicated 
> pages.
> |
> | +1
> |
> | Absolutely.  We should minimise as much as possible the overhead for
> | both documentors and document-searchers.
> |
> | I'm just a little concerned with "free-form".  Structure is good.
> | Organisation is better, Nazi is bad.
>
> I dont know exactly what Simon meant by free-form here, but It sounded
> like something cool :)

Free form is anti-narrative.  It took me a long long long long long 
time to be able to figure out ZPatterns, even though it has a 
comprehensive Wiki.  Many small documents (some large ones), so I was 
constantly clicking on things to get their definition and losing my 
context of trying to understand the whole.

> | Is that the end of this thread? ;-)
>
> I hope not! I think that no one jumped into this discussion cause
> everybody agrees that a central zwiki is a good idea. So, I propose
> moving forward and putting the idea into action. I'll be available to
> help this saturday if you guys are willing to start, but we may need
> some help from Jeffrey, at least to give us the right permissions to
> modify the wikis.

My personal opinion is that there's a lot of Wiki data that would be 
better to un-wikify (or is so out of date that it should be destroyed 
altogether).  But I fear that I may be in the minority on that.  Let it 
be a central wiki with this one admonition - PLEASE let there be little 
or no pages of bulleted lists of wiki names without some description 
(this pattern is very common on many Zope.org wikis, which contributes 
to my perception of them being more of a dumping ground than useful 
documentation).

By the way - is this proposal to unify all the Wikis on current 
Zope.org?  I was under the impression that it was how the NZO wiki 
situation should be dealt with.

If this is to go on the current Zope.org, I need to see a more thorough 
proposal that describes what is going to be done to unify the wikis, 
and which ones will be affected so that I can give out the right 
permissions if needs-be.  And I need more convincing as to why this is 
a good thing to do with the current content and why it shouldn't be 
left as is until NZO kicks in and we can decide what to keep and what 
to throw away - because most of the content in the Wikis that I've 
glanced over this morning would be of little or no help to anyone 
picking up Zope 2.5 or later.  If we want to keep it for historical 
purposes, we may as well keep it at the historical URLs.

If a replacement for Wiki central is planned that would be fresh, and 
populated off of some of the ideas and structures of the existing 
wikis, that would be different.  My reasoning for this is that if we 
lose the "last-modified" date on a lot of the content (ie, if it were 
just copied), it's harder to determine its relevance.

Jeffrey P Shell, jeffrey@cuemedia.com