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

Fri Jul 7 20:19:08 UTC 2006

Hi Kim,

On Friday 07 July 2006 10:08, Kim Bruning wrote:
> 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"; # :-)
>
Absolutely! :)

> 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!
>

Obviously, I'm not a wiki expert.  I'm simply a Systems Engineer and Perl 
Programming Language advocate, who frequently uses Wikipedia to learn, and I 
really like what Wikimedia has been doing over the last few years, so I'm 
also a Wikimedia advocate.  I really liked Shlomi's great idea, and Shlomi is 
a wiki expert from Israel, and he has researched and/or used a variety of 
wiki server programs.  Jacinta is a wiki expert from Australia, and she said 
that http://perl.net.au uses MediaWiki for their wiki named "PerlNet — The 
Perl portal for Australia and New Zealand."  I simply said that I'd like to 
help them to set this good thing up, and I'm trying to figure out "The Right 
Way" to do it.

> 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!
>
My first answer to you is Yes, I'm "totally crazy." :)  I'm not doing too good 
with personal funds anymore, but that personal time thing is fairly easy for 
me now.  For the past few years, while Wikimedia has been doing all of their 
very interesting, technical and world-changing work, I've been fully disabled 
and recovering from a very serious illness, an unidentified CNS disorder that 
has left me physically disabled, but I'm extremely lucky that my mental 
capabilities are being returned to me, and I still get to be Dad for two 
beautiful girls.  I believe that God has kept me here for some of His own 
good reasons.  I used to integrate Submarine and Surface Ship combat systems, 
which is not a bad thing to do in this world, but now I'm focused on writing 
programs to protect children from visual attacks on the internet, and some 
other things, like helping people out at the perl.beginners usenet.

These other interesting things that you've mentioned, previously unknown to 
me, are the types of things that I'm trying to discover, learn and understand 
through this discussion.  Thanks much.  I really like that word "trivially," 
because those "inter-wiki links" are my real practical concern.  I want to 
achieve very tight content-coupling with all of Wikimedia's excellent content 
to eliminate redundancies, ambiguities and errors, and to make it very 
apparent that the Perl community is contributing the Perl-particular content 
under the greater Wikimedia-general content, and "The Perl Wiki" is simply to 
do "The Right Thing" by adding its underlying content for "The Bigger 
Picture" being presented by The Wikimedia Foundation's "very broad and 
general purpose wikis."  The more general things should go up into the 
greater wiki nodes, and the more particular things should go down into the 
lesser wiki nodes.  There'll be no redundancy, if we can achieve this tight 
content-coupling through those trivially implemented "inter-wiki links."  And 
at the point of successfully achieving some very good, free & open content, 
functionality and availability, who particularly cares what something is 
called underneath, where it's hosted or who owns the name of a particular 
wiki at the moment.  If it all somehow synergizes, then we don't need to fix 
it, but until we have this functional shuffle toward a convergence that I 
believe can be brought to fruition, I'll look around to find out how to fix 
it "The Right Way" for "The Perl Wiki" to consolidate the Perl wikis that are 
out there right now.

>
> 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.
>
I'm not a big enough crazy to try to do something like this all by myself.  I 
don't want to do it for me, but for us.  I'm just advocating Shlomi's good 
idea, and acting upon my personal commitment to help get it started, by 
researching and having some good discussions with nice people like you, and 
the others whom I've met here.

> 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.
>
I originally went to the #wikipedia-bootcamp channel, etc., before joining 
Foundation-l to start this discussion.

> Finally:
> There's only one small disadvantage to this entire plan (from a perl
> perspective): Mediawiki is written in PHP  ;-)
>
I did some PHP-CGI scripting for my WWW::YouTube distribution that I published 
in the CPAN, but most importantly I want to keep things simple for the long 
term by closely following Wikimedia's pattern.  I think that Wikimedia is on 
"The Right Path."

Angela Beesley sent me a very nice email yesterday, from Wikia, to tell me 
that she has set up http://perl.wikia.com and the perl-l at wikia.com mailing 
list.  I haven't gotten a chance to do much about it yet, but I'm fairly 
satisfied that some good progress is being made.

Thanks again,

Eric
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