On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Posted Apr 27, 2010 14:00 UTC (Tue) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
In reply to: On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event by k8to
Parent article: On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Wiki markup offers only a bare subset of basic HTML, and it's inconsistent and arbitrary. To take one example, consider a hyperlink: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links

The format is completely different depending on whether the link is to an external or an internal page. For an external page, you can just write the URI, and it will (supposedly) be parsed and linked to itself. Unless it's a mailto:, in which case you use [] brackets. If you want to link text, however, you must enclose the link in brackets, include whitespace, and include the text you want linked inside the brackets. If you want to link to an internal wiki-page, of course, you use [[]] double brackets, no whitespace, and a | pipe. Plus on external links, you can't link to reserved words like "video" because those get trapped by the parser and turned into icons. Accidentally use the [] brackets and no link text, and that creates a numbered list item. Want to prevent auto-linkifying URLs; that requires HTML-like < > angle brackets.

Stuff like that. Rather than a well-formed <a> tag. And it's all like that; the table format is a pain to read and to write, signatures have a screwy rule based on a string of ~ tildes of arbitrary length. But none of it deals with the main problem, which is that wikis are designed to blur the barrier between reading and editing a page -- which is appropriate for a crowd-sourced document system like Wikipedia itself, but is not structured for use by an organized team, such as a proper CMS is. The right tool for the right job; that's what we want for project management.

Nate

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On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Posted May 2, 2010 17:56 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (4 responses)

There's your problem. MediaWiki isn't much of a wiki, having far too much impenetrable syntax, and kind of failing at the discussion concept.

On a traditional wiki links are MadeLinkThis and external links are http://made.like.this.example.com/foo

Nothing to get wrong, nothing to misunderstand.

On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Posted May 2, 2010 22:20 UTC (Sun) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link] (3 responses)

On a traditional wiki links are MadeLinkThis and external links are http://made.like.this.example.com/foo

That's definitely another strike against it in my book. In addition, the point remains that unless the document that you are trying to create is designed to have wiki-like public editability, there is no reason to limit your search for CMS software to the wiki-only subset of available projects. Any more than there is to limit your search to blog-based packages like Wordpress. Yes, you can create good static, non-blog sites with Wordpress. But if you don't do a serious comparison against Drupal, Joomla, Scoop, Xaraya, TYPO3 -- and the dozens and dozens of others -- you make a poorly-informed decision. And you miss out on functionality that you find out further down the road that you need.

Nate

On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Posted May 3, 2010 23:44 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

You missed it.

If you need a CMS, you should get a CMS. However, they have somewhat poor collaboration.

If instead your goal is really the kind of collaboration empowered by low-friction wiki environments, you sould employ a tasteful subset of the wikis out there, and you'll see vastly more powerful results out of the interaction than any CMS will provide.

On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Posted May 4, 2010 13:50 UTC (Tue) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link] (1 responses)

Collaboration != "low friction" text editing. To keep distributed teams in sync on complex tasks, you need a more powerful solution -- for the reasons I already outlined.

Nate

On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Posted May 4, 2010 15:10 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I think I disagree with your equation, and that we have pretty different ideas about the definition of that word. Oh well.