Re: moving to a git-backed wiki

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 7:45 PM, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, Feb 02, 2011 at 06:24:23PM -0800, J.H. wrote:

quoted

On 02/02/2011 01:55 AM, Vincent Hanquez wrote:

quoted

 On 01/02/11 22:48, J.H. wrote:

quoted

The wiki will almost universally have a "central site" no matter what
the backend.  Personally I see little advantage to having a git backed
wiki myself.

with git based wiki, you can clone the whole wiki on your local machine,
and read/edit/commit on it locally using standard editor tool (i.e.
$EDITOR). and the history/revision/diff is completely built-in.

That would be fine for things like source code or documentation, but you
end up with a single person who would need to merge / push things to a
central location, a-la git.wiki.kernel.org.  You are now taking
something, that is already editable by anyone, and making it only
editable by a single person.

I don't think it makes sense to use the same workflow for the wiki as
git.git itself uses. The point of having a wiki is to keep the barrier
to editing extremely low; the point of source code control is to keep
the quality of contributions high.

But that doesn't mean they can't be accessed by the same tool.

Forget about a git-backed wiki for a moment, and imagine a regular old
Mediawiki. What are the operations you can perform? You can look at
the current or any past version of a page, you can do diffs between
versions of pages, and you can create a new version of a page. All
through some CGI forms.

Howe about these?

1) Support for discussion; since changes can be controversial.

2) Support for article move; so everything is kept organized.

3) Support for "who is linking here". Also helps reorganization.

4) Support for categories. Ditto.

5) Support for watchlist, e-mail notifications. So that you are
up-to-date with the changes.

6) Support for contribution backtracking. So that it's easy to know who's who.

7) Personal wiki pages (with discussion). So you can put information
about yourself, and general notes.

-- 
Felipe Contreras