[Foundation-l] The Perl Wiki

Sat Jul 8 16:08:03 UTC 2006

On Saturday 08 July 2006 18:34, Eric R. Meyers wrote:
> Hi Shlomi,
>

Hi Eric!

I subscribed to foundation-L to avoid bounces. If the incoming emails from it 
become too overwhelming I will set up a filter, or posssibly instruct mailman 
not to send me any mails. (so I can send mails, but won't receive any emails 
that weren't CCed to me.)

> On Saturday 08 July 2006 06:26, you wrote:
> > > On Friday 07 July 2006 17:47, you wrote:
> > > > Personally, I feel that putting the central Perl wiki within
> > > > Wikipedia may not be such a good idea. That's because Perl hackers
> > > > may wish to deviate somewhat from Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View.
> > > > For example, the Perl wiki may have an entry about Python, Ruby, Tcl,
> > > > etc. with some criticisms of their approaches of doing things.
> > >
> > > There is a correct time and a correct place for everything.  There are
> > > some things that are appropriate to be placed neutrally under the Perl
> > > topic within Wikipedia itself, and some are not, so we just need to
> > > organize and police things smartly, moderating the content as needed to
> > > make it public, while providing external links out to the proper
> > > private location, or locations, for the Perl biased expressions to
> > > occur.  No foul and no problem, I believe.
> >
> > Right, but this will fragment the Perl central wiki. If people have to
> > look in two different places, this would be confusing. I'd rather have
> > one wiki and that's it.
>
> I absolutely agree with you, but all options are kept available to us.  I'm
> formally removing the incorrect name "Perl-Wikipedia" from this discussion
> about "The Perl Wiki," to avoid any further confusion.

OK. Good.

>
> People will be going to two major information resources.  They will be
> going to Wikipedia to learn about many topics, including Perl, and they
> will be going directly to The Perl Wiki for its centralized Perl
> information.  

Right.

> I believe that the Perl related topics within Wikipedia will 
> be a very big part of the total information solution, along with The Perl
> Wiki however it is implemented.
>

Correct. I believe it's impossible to completely eliminate duplicate 
information. Even Wikipedia alone has a large amount of redundancy, which is 
naturally expected of an Encyclopedia and similar data sources.

> > > I also believe that a truly objective Perl person could legitimately
> > > write a factually valid and complete critique about the various
> > > programming languages, comparing "their approaches of doing things"
> > > without showing a bias toward any particular language, or languages.
> >
> > True, but see below.
> >
> > > We just need to be very
> > > fair, complete and moderate in what we do for the general public.  It's
> > > simply a difference between the formality of writing from "Wikipedia's
> > > Neutral Point of View" and someone quickly hacking out an expression of
> > > their Perl biased opinions in a more private Perl setting.
> >
> > Yes, but I still believe that a Perl wiki may be somewhat different than
> > a Perl section in the wikipedia.
>
> I completely agree with you, because like you've been doing with your
> recent Wikipedia entry about Tom Christiansen, and your Wikibooks project
> for Newbies, 

Actually, my Perl for Newbies series of Presentations is not part of 
wikibooks. I wrote it before I was aware of wikipedia and possibly before 
wikibooks existed. It was written using Quad-Pres, which is a sort-of home 
grown HTML slides generator.

Like I said, the text and code in the slides are public domain, so they could 
be integrated into separate works. Part of them were already reformated into 
tutorials or howto's as part of http://perlmeme.org/. [1]

I have some ideas for a 5th or 6th presentation or perhaps I need to beef up 
my 4th presentatio, but I'll have to start writing them.

One wikibook that I started as an experiment in web-accessible (and to a 
lesser extent collaborative) writing is:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Optimizing_Code_for_Speed

I've wanted to write it for a long time and even prepared an outline:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Optimizing_Code_for_Speed/Outline

While I prefer to use DocBook/XML, Subversion and gvim for documents I write, 
I've started working on this book as a wikibook to see if I find it better 
for this. If I'm happy with this experiment, I may use it for some of my 
future essays (but probably not all).

> there are "A Lot of Things Perl," including good encyclopedic 
> or technical information that is best created within Wikipedia or
> Wikibooks, and simply referenced by The Perl Wiki as needed to amplify the
> local topics or discussions going on in the in everday happenings of The
> Perl Wiki.
>

Right.

> The global Perl community has a very good story to tell to the world
> through all of the Wikimedia components that are available.  You're doing
> exactly "The Right Stuff," by utilizing the Wikimedia components to tell
> part of the Perl story, by adding a page in Wikipedia to tell the world
> about Tom Christiansen's great contributions to Perl, and by writing new
> Wikibooks to help bring new people into the Perl community.

Indeed.

Hack on!

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the
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