Subject:
Re: Wiki questions
From:
Erik Moeller ####@####.####
Date:
15 Jan 2003 09:06:56 -0000
Message-Id: <1042621604.1283.28.camel@chesoo.fokus.gmd.de>
Hello David,
please understand that OpenFacts is not intended to be in competition to
any existing effort. We try to cooperate as much as we can.
The public domain vs. GPL-style license debate is of course an ancient
one and I won't go into this much, as we will allow posting documents on
OpenFacts under non-PD licenses if the terms are properly pointed out on
the page; however, permission to modify the doc should always be
granted.
I did not want to explain in detail why we chose to set up a Wikipedia
as opposed to other systems, but since you asked me / BerliOS to provide
support for Lampadas, let me try to explain why we are doing this.
Wikipedia has been tremendously successful. It is a truly fascinating
project. In two years, they have created nearly 100,000 articles, many
of which are much longer and more detailed than what you would find in a
differently published encyclopedia. Of course, not all of it is
brilliant prose. Some articles are ill-researched, biased or wrong.
However, these mistakes are gradually ironed out as the wiki grows.
Why has Wikipedia been so successful at attracting people who are
experts in all kinds of extremely different fields? The answer is
openness. See a typo? Just edit the page and fix it, you don't even need
to sign on. Sabotage is prevented with several tools, from personal
article watchlists to the massive recent changes list, which are checked
in junkie-like fashion by the users. The editing syntax is delightfully
simple and easy to read. The user interface still needs some polishing,
but it is much better than that of all other wikis I know. The [[free
links]] syntax guarantees readable text.
The common criticisms of wikis have proven to be invalid. There is only
one major criticism that remains: You never know if the revision you see
has been properly fact-checked or not. The way to address this criticism
is to allow trusted users to certify specific revisions, either within
the wiki or, as I would suggest in the case of LDP, separate from it.
OpenFacts is not intended only for LDP material. We plan to provide some
original stuff, and every BerliOS-hosted project of course gets space on
the wiki. Thomas Waldmann of LinuxWiki has also expressed interest in
cooperation (as soon as the license question is resolved -- LW currently
has no license -- we may import articles from there). With all this
together, we hope to create a Wikipedia-style effort that is truly open
to anyone who follows the (few) rules.
The arguments for closedness sound anachronistic to me. Most users have
good intentions and do not write about subjects they absolutely do not
understand; if they do, it is simple enough to correct them. A more
common problem is that users do not follow established stylistic rules
and so on, which means that a wiki always requires people cleaning up
after newbies. Wikipedia has attracted enough of those people; I hope we
can, too.
It would be delightful to us if some LDP authors choose to maintain
their writings using OpenFacts. Failing that, we hope that other people
interested in the subjects in question join in and add useful content.
My experience with wikis justifies this hope. I was skeptical at first,
too, but wikis really work great in practice.
As for diffs, please take a look at a sample Wikipedia diff:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Queen_Catherine&diff=0&oldid=588106
Wikipedia highlights both the paragraphs and the individual words that
are changed.
I would also like to point out that, while OpenFacts is a new project,
the underlying Wikipedia software (to which I contribute) is not. It is
relatively mature, has support even for advanced stuff like LaTeX
equations, and is constantly developed. I have limited
OpenFacts-specific changes (such as a common user database for all
languages) to a minimum, so it will be no problem getting new Wikipedia
features into OpenFacts.
For those who are interested in helping, there is now a mailing list:
https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/openfacts-eng
Specifically, I'd still be interested in solutions to convert SGML or
groff to wikitext. Has this been addressed for Lampadas?
Regards,
Erik Moeller
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
