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If anyone's interested I've got thoughts on how to improve wikis here: https://housejeffries.com/page/4 https://housejeffries.com/page/4 My main issue with cur

If anyone's interested I've got thoughts on how to improve wikis here: https://housejeffries.com/page/4 https://housejeffries.com/page/4 My main issue with current wikis is that if you make a contribution and it's deleted, it's gone from the web. I think that if you're making heavy contributions to a page they should start on a personal wiki and then be pulled into the main wiki "pull request" style. That way if some over-aggressive editor deletes your work it stays on the internet, just on your personal wiki instead of the main site.

chadwittman 10y ago
That's a great idea
Balgair 10y ago
I think this is not going to work on any large scale. Say you are a domain expert in some tiny little plant on some tiny island. Like, you wrote your PhD thesis on that plant. Sure, this is not very 'big', but it merits inclusion into the Wiki. Telling people that want to contribute, that are the domain experts, that have read and debated all the sources of which they may be the definitive source, that they have to go figure out how to set up their own wiki somewhere and then try to figure how to 'pull' and 'push' things to Wikipedia on a semi-regular basis because of some bot's deletion bias is the best way to make certain that Wikipedia is only written by insane people.
- brianpgordon 10y ago
  Some people do prefer to work on a new article in their user space (sub-pages of their user page which you're free to edit without interference) until it's in shape to be moved to mainspace (the actual Wikipedia that you can search).
- aleksei 10y ago
  The point is that the article is likely to be deleted, so if anyone sets up their own wiki it's a net win, since the information won't be deleted altogether.
  - Balgair 10y ago
    I understand the point, what I am saying is that most of the contributors will have no idea how to implement this idea nor the technical chops to do it.
- seagreen 10y ago
  If you read down to the "Problems" section of the page, you'll see that I agree with you. I don't consider my prototype (that uses git) an acceptable solution at scale. The actual solution would need to be as easy to set up and use as gmail. But if you're going to do the work of setting up hosted personal servers for wiki pages, you might as well do it for all content. And that's actually the plan! I'm working on it here if you're interested: https://juniorschematics.com/ https://juniorschematics.com/
- flukus 10y ago
  They could host personal wiki's and make them easy to setup, like how tumblr etc make it east to setup a personal blog.
  - Balgair 10y ago
    I think that it workable, however, how do you tell people to go out and do that? Wikipedia is unlikely to tell contributors to go off to somewhere else to contribute; it makes little sense.
    - flukus 10y ago
      I was thinking something like GitHub, create an account and you can write your own page's or fork other pages, modify them and do a pull request. You're forked version survives regardless of what happens to the pull request.
      - Balgair 10y ago
        I do think that is a good idea, however, trying to tell historians and bio-peepz and whomever else that is not a programmer how to do this, and the reasons they need to do this in the first place, will end in failure. Adding more steps in that process will decrease use and contributions.
vmorgulis 10y ago
Why not use Markdown instead of MediaWiki syntax? About URLs, you can take a look at StrongLink: https://github.com/btrask/stronglink https://github.com/btrask/stronglink Your JSON subset is very interesting too: https://github.com/seagreen/Son https://github.com/seagreen/Son
- seagreen 10y ago
  I actually do use markdown for the git-repo based prototype. My personal website itself actually uses that prototype. You can see an example "page" here: https://github.com/housejeffries-pages/2 https://github.com/housejeffries-pages/2 Thanks for the nice words about Son. I need to get it completed (the spec still needs some touch ups) and get prototype implementations written, once that's done I think it will be pretty useful. Thanks for the tip about StrongLink, that's definitely up my alley. Already I'm finding it useful, for instance in the docs it mentions ni URLs (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6920 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6920), which is something I'd never heard of before. If you have any more comments or criticisms of my projects feel free to email me, none of them are quite to the stage I can start promoting them yet, but getting feedback is still super important.
  - vmorgulis 10y ago
    > If you have any more comments or criticisms of my projects feel free to email me... Done ;-) A first wiki could be around your project. It can be made with existing tools (pandoc, github...) if the workflow is clear enough (even with manual parts).

chadwittman 10y ago

That's a great idea

Balgair 10y ago

I think this is not going to work on any large scale. Say you are a domain expert in some tiny little plant on some tiny island. Like, you wrote your PhD thesis on that plant. Sure, this is not very 'big', but it merits inclusion into the Wiki. Telling people that want to contribute, that are the domain experts, that have read and debated all the sources of which they may be the definitive source, that they have to go figure out how to set up their own wiki somewhere and then try to figure how to 'pull' and 'push' things to Wikipedia on a semi-regular basis because of some bot's deletion bias is the best way to make certain that Wikipedia is only written by insane people.

brianpgordon 10y ago
Some people do prefer to work on a new article in their user space (sub-pages of their user page which you're free to edit without interference) until it's in shape to be moved to mainspace (the actual Wikipedia that you can search).
aleksei 10y ago
The point is that the article is likely to be deleted, so if anyone sets up their own wiki it's a net win, since the information won't be deleted altogether.
- Balgair 10y ago
  I understand the point, what I am saying is that most of the contributors will have no idea how to implement this idea nor the technical chops to do it.
seagreen 10y ago
If you read down to the "Problems" section of the page, you'll see that I agree with you. I don't consider my prototype (that uses git) an acceptable solution at scale. The actual solution would need to be as easy to set up and use as gmail. But if you're going to do the work of setting up hosted personal servers for wiki pages, you might as well do it for all content. And that's actually the plan! I'm working on it here if you're interested: https://juniorschematics.com/ https://juniorschematics.com/
flukus 10y ago
They could host personal wiki's and make them easy to setup, like how tumblr etc make it east to setup a personal blog.
- Balgair 10y ago
  I think that it workable, however, how do you tell people to go out and do that? Wikipedia is unlikely to tell contributors to go off to somewhere else to contribute; it makes little sense.
  - flukus 10y ago
    I was thinking something like GitHub, create an account and you can write your own page's or fork other pages, modify them and do a pull request. You're forked version survives regardless of what happens to the pull request.
    - Balgair 10y ago
      I do think that is a good idea, however, trying to tell historians and bio-peepz and whomever else that is not a programmer how to do this, and the reasons they need to do this in the first place, will end in failure. Adding more steps in that process will decrease use and contributions.

vmorgulis 10y ago

Why not use Markdown instead of MediaWiki syntax? About URLs, you can take a look at StrongLink: https://github.com/btrask/stronglink https://github.com/btrask/stronglink Your JSON subset is very interesting too: https://github.com/seagreen/Son https://github.com/seagreen/Son

seagreen 10y ago
I actually do use markdown for the git-repo based prototype. My personal website itself actually uses that prototype. You can see an example "page" here: https://github.com/housejeffries-pages/2 https://github.com/housejeffries-pages/2 Thanks for the nice words about Son. I need to get it completed (the spec still needs some touch ups) and get prototype implementations written, once that's done I think it will be pretty useful. Thanks for the tip about StrongLink, that's definitely up my alley. Already I'm finding it useful, for instance in the docs it mentions ni URLs (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6920 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6920), which is something I'd never heard of before. If you have any more comments or criticisms of my projects feel free to email me, none of them are quite to the stage I can start promoting them yet, but getting feedback is still super important.
- vmorgulis 10y ago
  > If you have any more comments or criticisms of my projects feel free to email me... Done ;-) A first wiki could be around your project. It can be made with existing tools (pandoc, github...) if the workflow is clear enough (even with manual parts).