First, sorry to clutter up the newsgroup with wiki discussion for those
who are not interested, but at the moment we don't have anywhere else to
discuss it (but hopefully will at the end of this message!).

Given that far more people seem in favour of MediaWiki than DokuWiki,
and that DokuWiki appears somewhat broken at the moment (it just
shouldn't be possible to break it by pasting in content, but that's just
what happened), I suggest we remove DokuWiki and stick with MediaWiki,
accessible at: http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/

Additionally, given that very few people seem interested in WordPress, I
suggest we remove that also.

Unless I get any loud "no" shouts, I intend to remove DW and WP
tomorrow. This will leave us with just MW.

I will leave MW up there for now, and see how things go over the next
couple of months. If the content continues to build, and there are no
complaints, I'll leave it up permanently.

Any suggestions for changes to the wiki are welcome, but I please keep
those discussions to some suitable place on the wiki, and not on the
newsgroup.

Does this sound ok to everyone, or does anyone have any problems with
any of it? Feel free to air your concerns here, or drop me an email (it
is valid).


--
Grunff

Grunff wrote:

First, sorry to clutter up the newsgroup with wiki discussion for those
who are not interested, but at the moment we don't have anywhere else to
discuss it (but hopefully will at the end of this message!).

Given that far more people seem in favour of MediaWiki than DokuWiki,
and that DokuWiki appears somewhat broken at the moment (it just
shouldn't be possible to break it by pasting in content, but that's just
what happened), I suggest we remove DokuWiki and stick with MediaWiki,
accessible at: http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/

Additionally, given that very few people seem interested in WordPress, I
suggest we remove that also.

Unless I get any loud "no" shouts, I intend to remove DW and WP
tomorrow. This will leave us with just MW.

I will leave MW up there for now, and see how things go over the next
couple of months. If the content continues to build, and there are no
complaints, I'll leave it up permanently.

Any suggestions for changes to the wiki are welcome, but I please keep
those discussions to some suitable place on the wiki, and not on the
newsgroup.

Does this sound ok to everyone, or does anyone have any problems with
any of it? Feel free to air your concerns here, or drop me an email (it
is valid).

Sounds perfect. Thanks for the work you've put in and for hosting it.
Gives me an excuse to frivol my time away while recovering.


NT

wrote:

Sounds perfect. Thanks for the work you've put in and for hosting it.
Gives me an excuse to frivol my time away while recovering.

You're welcome - I do think this could be very useful, but I can also
see potential problems :-)

You frivol away, I won't let the data be lost.


--
Grunff

Grunff wrote:
wrote:

Sounds perfect. Thanks for the work you've put in and for hosting it.
Gives me an excuse to frivol my time away while recovering.

You're welcome - I do think this could be very useful, but I can also
see potential problems :-)

You frivol away, I won't let the data be lost.

heh. I'm sure there are problems with everything in life.


NT

Grunff wrote:

Additionally, given that very few people seem interested in WordPress, I
suggest we remove that also.

Personally I liked the idea of that... however if there are fewer in
favour of that then I will go with the concensus.

Does this sound ok to everyone, or does anyone have any problems with
any of it? Feel free to air your concerns here, or drop me an email (it
is valid).

Sounds ok to me. Not had much of a chance to play with any of this over
the last few days, but will investigate more shortly when (I hope) there
is some spare time.



--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

John Rumm wrote:
Grunff wrote:

Additionally, given that very few people seem interested in WordPress,
I suggest we remove that also.

Personally I liked the idea of that... however if there are fewer in
favour of that then I will go with the concensus.

So did I, and I still have reservations about a wiki.

Many of the most recently created pages simply contain links to
periodproperty.co.uk. This is clearly not in the spirit of a wiki, and
is precisely the kind of thing that will get the wiki removed quite quickly.



Sounds ok to me. Not had much of a chance to play with any of this over
the last few days, but will investigate more shortly when (I hope) there
is some spare time.

Excellent, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.


--
Grunff

Grunff wrote:

Many of the most recently created pages simply contain links to
periodproperty.co.uk. This is clearly not in the spirit of a wiki, and
is precisely the kind of thing that will get the wiki removed quite quickly.

Eh? There is plenty of offsite content relevant to us. Or do you not
think the articles relevant to diy? I dont know. Do people not want
offsite content linked to? If so a lot of useful stuff has to go.

It would be quite a task to completely rewrite all offsite articles so
they can be posted on the wiki - but its upto everyone not just me.


NT

wrote:

Eh? There is plenty of offsite content relevant to us. Or do you not
think the articles relevant to diy? I dont know. Do people not want
offsite content linked to? If so a lot of useful stuff has to go.

It would be quite a task to completely rewrite all offsite articles so
they can be posted on the wiki - but its upto everyone not just me.

There's nothing wrong with linking to content elsewhere, that's a good
thing. But having large numbers of articles that contain nothing but a
link to another site, like:

http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...ch:_The_Basics
http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...6_Their_Repair
http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...neys_%26_Flues
http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...inishing_Guide
http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...an_Explanation
etc.

seems quite contradictory to the purpose of the wiki. You just end up
with a site that is largely an index for another site.


--
Grunff

Grunff wrote:
wrote:

Eh? There is plenty of offsite content relevant to us. Or do you not
think the articles relevant to diy? I dont know. Do people not want
offsite content linked to? If so a lot of useful stuff has to go.

It would be quite a task to completely rewrite all offsite articles so
they can be posted on the wiki - but its upto everyone not just me.

There's nothing wrong with linking to content elsewhere, that's a good
thing. But having large numbers of articles that contain nothing but a
link to another site, like:

http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...ch:_The_Basics
http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...6_Their_Repair
http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...neys_%26_Flues
http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...inishing_Guide
http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?...an_Explanation
etc.

seems quite contradictory to the purpose of the wiki. You just end up
with a site that is largely an index for another site.

Its your wiki, so if you let us all know any areas like this that youre
not happy with then we can avoid problems before they crop up.

There are 65 articles so far, and sure those 5 are all on one site. I
might be wrong but I assumed there would be a number of sites which
would already have a number of good articles on - in fact ISTR a site
somewhere about woodwork that had a huge list of articles, lots of
which would be great content for the wiki. And likely all of which cant
be pasted in due to copyright.

I realise links offsite arent the best way to present info in a wiki,
but at the moment we either link to useful content or dont have it. If
the Wiki runs long term I would expect the existence of these links
would prompt various people, at random times, to rewrite the content
and put it into the wiki, so probably most link-only articles would
become what we want them to eventually be. My thinking is that without
the links initially, many of the subjects linked to would quite likely
not get written about.

I see a link-only article as
a) the information is there, albeit not well presented, maximising the
wiki's use quickly
b) they would tend to serve as motivation for people to contribute to
present the informtaion in better ways
c) Hopefully most such links would end up as mature wiki articles

The Part P article/stub is perhaps an example of this where a little
wiki writing has already begun.

Maybe we all need to be clear on a policy re link articles, especially
as in early days there is bound to be a large amount of content worthy
of linking to, probably more content than has already been written for
wiki articles.


NT

wrote:

Its your wiki, so if you let us all know any areas like this that youre
not happy with then we can avoid problems before they crop up.

Not at all, that's not how I see it. It isn't my wiki, it belongs to
everyone who contributes. If most people are happy with something, then
I'm happy with it.


Maybe we all need to be clear on a policy re link articles, especially
as in early days there is bound to be a large amount of content worthy
of linking to, probably more content than has already been written for
wiki articles.

I don't wish to be deciding policies. I'd be happier to just see how
things develop over the next couple of months. I don't intend to make
any decisions contrary to what appears to be majority opinion.


--
Grunff

Owain wrote:
Grunff wrote:
So did I, and I still have reservations about a wiki.

It's only a means of collaboratively editing FAQ pages. It's up to you
and the FAQ maintainers to decide who gets editing permissions.

So is that what's going to happen, to stop vandalism/edit wars etc (ie,
editing permissions doled out) rather than free-for-all like Wikipedia?
Has this been decided?

David