[Foundation-l] A general wiki list?

Sun Aug 26 06:27:39 UTC 2007

On 8/23/07, Dirk Riehle <dirk at riehle.org> wrote:
> this has been tried, with little or no success. My feeling was that
> there simply is too little that motivates people to join and contribute
> on a general list. Or maybe marketing wasn't good enough.

It seems that it is about marketing. I am active in wiki communities
since the first half of 2004 and I didn't hear for wikisym. OK, I am
not perfectly informed, but this makes me as a very good example.

Actually, if I knew for wikisym and your lists, I wouldn't ask ibiblio
for the list because your project seems to me neutral enough. (Please,
wait for a couple of days, I want to see what is going on with
ibiblio. It is reasonable to use your project as a base for the list
and a supporting wiki.)

Such general list should be recognized by other wiki projects as a
common good. This means that page like
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/overview is (aka
http://lists.wikimedia.org/) should have such list(s) at the first
place (or after the most important like foundation-l and wikipedia-l
are). And on other project, too.

> I don't want to be too pessimistic, but what has changed? What specific
> topics would you discuss on a general list?

Wikimedia development teach us very good about steps of making lists.
First of all, we need a general list, then, if discussion spread into
a couple of important fields, lists should be separated.

I feel that we need a general list to talk about  (all of the subjects
are off topic on WM lists):

- "I have a good idea for a wiki project and I want to talk with tother"
- This wiki engine has very good features and it would be good if that
wiki engine adopt those features.
- Yes, standards. AFAIK, only tiki-wiki syntax is RFC'd. But, MW
syntax is de facto standard and it is easier to use. And it is not
reasonable to have a tone of dialects. We need both: RFC and ISO.
- We need, also, to define standard features of one wiki engine. For
example, I think that "recent changes" feature has to be a standard as
well as comparing two versions of one article.
- As SJ mentioned, we need a general list to talk about wiki
philosophy, too. (Actually, "philosophy" is maybe a hard word; but a
lot of meta issues related to philosophy are important to talk about:
What are social responsibilities of one wiki contributor? Did wiki
bring something new to the society and if it did, what did it bring?
...
- Cooperation between different projects. For example, I want to keep
merged a set of articles related to the Green Party of Canada between
my fictional wiki and wiki of GPC. If we made a deal about such
merging, we need a place where to announce it.
- (and so on)