4 ms·

But if it's just one person maintaining the wiki, with a few others contributing, why have a wiki at all instead of a centrally curated guide? With wiki like s

But if it's just one person maintaining the wiki, with a few others contributing, why have a wiki at all instead of a centrally curated guide? With wiki like systems, you get noise (in the form of people making mistaken changes, malicious changes, etc.). There's really only two ways you can guarantee quality, which is either the aforementioned person reversing those changes (undoubtedly additional work), or enough people checking those edits, improving or reverting them. But your small to medium size project isn't going to garner enough people to have the latter option work well. And if you have a small group of people that would be willing to do that maintenance work, why not just write some documentation together with them?

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
I cultivated a wiki for a few years in the hope that someone would come.
- solistice 13y ago
  If it will make you feel better, you could tell me the link and I'll check it out.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for the offer. It was an internal Wiki for my department at a small college. I used it to distribute lecture notes and things to students, and share other resources with other faculty. I also created a space for students to use it for their projects. It is defunct now. I got too busy last year to keep up with it, and haven't replaced it.
derefr 13y ago
What do you call a wiki coupled to a permissions system? That is, a CMS where: - every logged-in user is a contributor+editor+publisher and so can just edit-and-post content as if the system was a wiki, - but new users have to be created by some administator, or invited, etc; there's no "Register" link, - and for non-logged-in users, there are no trappings of "wikidom" visible (e.g. recent changes page, sandbox, any revision of posts other than the marked-as-last-known-good revision, etc.) I have a feeling that this is what 90% of documentation projects really want: something that's a wiki from the inside, and a CMS from the outside. Does this design have a name?
- emddudley 13y ago
  A wiki. You can customize wiki UIs to act exactly as you're describing, it's just that nobody changes the defaults.
  - derefr 13y ago
    You can customize wikis to make them into MMO games, but then they're not wikis any more. It would be useful to have a name, I think, for this specific thing, because then people who want this specific thing could download software that already provides this specific thing, with no customization involved.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      > You can customize wikis to make them into MMO games, but then they're not wikis any more. That's not necessarily true. I think it'd be interesting to make a religion-inspired MMO game that's about writing and rewriting a holy text. Use a voting system to make something sacrosanct and thus harder to make changes to.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

I cultivated a wiki for a few years in the hope that someone would come.

solistice 13y ago
If it will make you feel better, you could tell me the link and I'll check it out.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for the offer. It was an internal Wiki for my department at a small college. I used it to distribute lecture notes and things to students, and share other resources with other faculty. I also created a space for students to use it for their projects. It is defunct now. I got too busy last year to keep up with it, and haven't replaced it.

derefr 13y ago

What do you call a wiki coupled to a permissions system? That is, a CMS where: - every logged-in user is a contributor+editor+publisher and so can just edit-and-post content as if the system was a wiki, - but new users have to be created by some administator, or invited, etc; there's no "Register" link, - and for non-logged-in users, there are no trappings of "wikidom" visible (e.g. recent changes page, sandbox, any revision of posts other than the marked-as-last-known-good revision, etc.) I have a feeling that this is what 90% of documentation projects really want: something that's a wiki from the inside, and a CMS from the outside. Does this design have a name?

emddudley 13y ago
A wiki. You can customize wiki UIs to act exactly as you're describing, it's just that nobody changes the defaults.
- derefr 13y ago
  You can customize wikis to make them into MMO games, but then they're not wikis any more. It would be useful to have a name, I think, for this specific thing, because then people who want this specific thing could download software that already provides this specific thing, with no customization involved.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > You can customize wikis to make them into MMO games, but then they're not wikis any more. That's not necessarily true. I think it'd be interesting to make a religion-inspired MMO game that's about writing and rewriting a holy text. Use a voting system to make something sacrosanct and thus harder to make changes to.