Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Revisiting hosted wiki software

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hello!

On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 01:50:52PM +0000, Noah Slater wrote:
> I was just browsing around when I rediscovered the FSF Groups wiki:
> 
>   http://groups.fsf.org/
> 
> I was wondering about the possibility of providing a hosted wiki for 
> Savannah. I
> am aware that Stallman is cautious about this because of the possibility of
> linking to or promoting non-free software.

I've been discussing all this with RMS, Karl, etc. some months ago in the
context of the GNU Hurd wiki (which is now online even for serving the
main page, <http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/>, in some sort of ``special
wiki mode'', see on
<http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/contributing/web_pages.html> the ``When
you commit changes...'' paragraph).

I've been meaning to write all this wiki stuff down, also initiated again
by FSFE's Matthias Kirschner (CCed) asking me about it.  I'll do that
soon, I promise.

Also, some more months ago, I initiated a discussion on a GNU internal
GNU maintainers' list (<address@hidden>, CCed) about having a
central GNU wiki setup.  Some people liked the idea and even told me so.
I didn't work on this any further so far.  For the GNU Hurd wiki (and now
web pages as well) we are using the ikiwiki software,
<http://ikiwiki.info/>, rendering the pages stored in a git repository,
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=hurd/web.git>.  This scheme was
also liked and supported by the people on gnu-prog-discuss.


> I spent a bit of time thinking about this and wondered why this was any more 
> of
> an issue on a wiki than a public mailing list, or in fact the existing FSF
> Groups wiki. If someone posted a link to some non-free software on a mailing
> list there is nothing you can do about it, at least with a wiki you are able 
> to
> edit articles to remove the offending material.
> 
> My experience developing CouchDB with a public wiki [1] has convinced me that 
> it
> can be a tremendously powerful tool for collecting and aggregating tips, help,
> advice, and literature about a software project.
> 
> Is there a case we could make to Stallman? If he were to accept, would this be
> technically feasible or desirable by the Savannah hackers?
> 
> [1] http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/


Regards,
 Thomas

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature