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

Fri Jul 7 14:08:12 UTC 2006

On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 03:38:53PM -0400, Eric R. Meyers wrote:
> I don't know if Shlomi or Jacinta have read my very enthusiastic response to 
> Shlomi's post on the perl.advocacy usenet, but I've begun to research my idea 
> on Wikipedia, towards the creation of Perl-Wikipedia, "The Free Encyclopedia 
> of Perl."

open WIKI, "perl" or die "for great justice"; # :-)

Hello Eric,
I understand you'd like to set up a centralised wiki for all perl
programmers.

Wikimedia foundation has some very broad, general purpose wikis, and
it's probably not what you want.

However, the foundation does also release their mediawiki software under
GPL. Setting up your own server is probably your best bet, and it's not
hard! 

The program Mediawiki (our wiki server software) has options to
trivially make inter-wiki links, so you can tie your wiki to any other
particular existing wiki quite easily. You might also like to make use
of the patches being developed by the literate programming wiki folks
mentioned elsewhere in this thread. These will even allow the server to validate
perl code that's on your wiki.

Finally, if you have funds or time that the
literate programming people don't,  you could work with them to
provide virtual machines for sandboxes (either server-side or if you're
totally crazy you could even try for client-side). This would allow you
to even safely run perl code straight off the wiki!

In short, wikimedia foundation adheres to the unix philosophy in that
it's good at one (small set of) thing(s), and doing it/them well. 

To do something else (like make a wiki specific to perl) , you might
want to set it up yourself. As a bonus, you can customize the heck out
of it while you're at it.

Of course, a number of volunteers will be very very interested in what
you're doing, so you'd likely get plenty of help. There's also a channel
on irc.freenode.net : #mediawiki, where you can get help with the
software.

Finally:
There's only one small disadvantage to this entire plan (from a perl
perspective): Mediawiki is written in PHP  ;-)

read you soon,
	Kim Bruning

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