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JREF Wiki?

heath

Thinker
H
Joined
Oct 22, 2001
Messages
152
Anyone else here familar with Wikis?

I think considering the forum is trying to break up into a more formal info source and a less formal chat room type forum a wiki would be an excellent resource as part of the formal data source.

The benefits of wikis are
  • rapid content generation
  • "natural" linking between subjects
  • very colaborative
  • Anyone can contribute <super>*</super>

<super>*</super>The forum moderators could approve all changes before they're made public to prevent stupid or malicious people ruining the content.

Good details at the twiki web about what wikis are
 
Sounds interesting! Can you point us to sample or example sites of wikis?


...he said, expecting some obvious answers...
 
I've used Twiki before. Pretty sweet collaboration widget. About as easy/hard to use as UBB for the same relative reasons.

Someone still has to 'moderate' it, but it maintains versions of articles, so you can revert out nonsense, or browse the evolution of an article pretty trivially.

Definitely, if you go the WIKI route, the version control in TWIKI is recommended.

It's also useful for other projects. If you have a big team full of people designing different bits of something, the WIKI can collect a lot of documentation into one place, and it's fairly easy to reorganize it, too.
 
I think it would be a good tool for the people of this forum to use to add to the useful web content for the jref; give something back if you will. The current swift and UBB mix is great for browsing in idle hours but not great for finding specific information IMO.

It would have to be managed differently than a BB (because it's not one). For one who could post would need to be strictly controlled because there are a lot of angry and confused people out there that would ruin an open wiki. There would also need to be a lot more moderation rolling back updates that ruin the content or message intended.

This will sound like a lot of work to people not familiar with wikis but the outcome is a very powerful knowlege base that the BB and swift currently don't provide.
 
From what I have seen of wikipedia wikis work fine untill you have something contriversal. They then tend to run into problems. If this is decided to be a good idea I think it would be more suited to the SC board.
 
Well, the nice thing is, you can control who does have modification access to the WIKI stuff.

I don't recall or never found out the exact extent of what could be configured in TWIKI for access control of specific topics.

At worst, you might have a slightly more open TWIKI invited for people with an established forum history that isn't too obnoxious, and then a far less open and more controlled TWIKI that extracts details from that.
 
I use twiki too (which is just one of many wiki implementations) and you can add people to wiki groups and then restrict who can modify or view any web by group (potentially any topic in a web too, not sure, we don' really use it).

Generally wikis are completely open but I don't think that would work for the jref. Too many people with an agenda that doesn't match that of the foundation.
 
Based on this very recent and short acquaintence with them, I think a JREF "Knowledge Base" wiki would be a good thing, in the main.

However some points immediately spring to mind:

1. (As mentioned) moderation task size.
2. Disk space considerations?
3. Server performance considerations?
4. Degree of potential overlap with other wikis, such as Wikipedia?
 
heath said:
Anyone else here familar with Wikis?

I think considering the forum is trying to break up into a more formal info source and a less formal chat room type forum a wiki would be an excellent resource as part of the formal data source.

The benefits of wikis are
  • rapid content generation
  • "natural" linking between subjects
  • very colaborative
  • Anyone can contribute <super>*</super>

<super>*</super>The forum moderators could approve all changes before they're made public to prevent stupid or malicious people ruining the content.

Good details at the twiki web about what wikis are
Click to expand...

I'm not against it, and would participate.

But it would be duplicating the excellent effort of The Skeptic's Dictionary.

Worth doing if linked to the main JREF page, but we would have a lot of catching up to do.
 
Hmm, yeah I meant something like the dictionary...

Nice resource, thanks for the heads-up.

I still think a jref wiki would be good as a consolidation point for exactly this sort of info though. Compiling all the great stuff scattered throughout the forum, links to other resources etc in a format that doesn't require so much searching or bumping of interesting topics.

[edit to add below]

A much better wiki description than the one at the twiki web in my first post is this one from wikipedia
 
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