[Foundation-l] The Perl Wiki, or Perl-Wikipedia

Thu Jul 6 00:13:30 UTC 2006

Hi Erik,

On Wednesday 05 July 2006 18:23, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Hello Eric,
>
> as geni has explained, the Wikimedia Foundation tends to launch broad
> projects over narrow ones: Wikipedia over "an encyclopedia of birds",
> Wikinews over "a news site about health issues", Wikisource over
> "public domain novels", and so on.
>
No problem.  I understand Wikimedia's interest of breadth of topics in 
Wikipedia, over depth of topics, but how do we correctly tie a 
special-interest encyclopedia, "The Free Encyclopedia of Perl," into the main 
general-purpose encyclopedia, "The Free Encyclopedia," and also to other 
possible special-interest encyclopedias.  Do you know what I mean, and do now 
you know where I'm trying to go with this WikiMedia-based hierarchy?  I don't 
want to copy or steal, just emulate and extend.  I need to know the best 
hierarchical structure that will integrate the various special-interest 
information sources most effectively to avoid redundancy and bring about 
synergy with the Wikimedia components such as Wikipedia, and now Wikibooks.

> Much of the content of an "encyclopedia of Perl" would likely have a
> place in our existing Wikipedia and Wikibooks projects. For source
> code, there's also an interesting wiki at:
> http://en.literateprograms.org/

Thanks, I'll take a look at that site.

So right now, if most of the Perl content would be in Wikibooks, then you'd 
apparently have no problem with some editing under the Perl topic in 
Wikipedia to organize and reference those Wikibooks, as long as we didn't go 
too far into the great depth of the topic of Perl within Wikipedia?  We could 
possibly find "The Right Way" to incrementally cooperate, working together 
and agreeing which direction that we might go in the future?  There will be 
external references to glue everything together, but as long as it gets glued 
together, that's okay.  We can incrementally figure out "The Right Way" to do 
things.

I didn't want to slam Wikipedia, by doing too much of the wrong or right 
things, without Wikimedia having some clue as to what was happening 
underneath the Perl topic.  Okay?

>
> What would be the justification for starting a new separate Wikimedia
> site just for Perl? Mind you, nothing will stop you from setting up
> your own site using the MediaWiki software (except maybe an aversion
> to PHP ;-). You can also use a wiki hosting service, like the ones
> listed at:
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science:How_to_start_a_Wiki

My real interest is integrating the depth of Perl knowledge with the breadth 
of Wikipedia knowledge, creating Perl-Wikipedia, and "The Perl Wiki" will 
eventually happen.  And yes, I do PHP-CGI too, and we're already aware of 
MediaWiki in the perl.advocacy usenet group, because I know that it's 
currently being used for the Australian Perl Wiki at http://perl.net.au, 
which I referenced in my initial submission.

Eric
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