migrating to mediawiki

[Massimo Dentico]

> Dear Tunespeople,
>
> are there people here with some energy for maintaining the Tunes
> project? The Wiki is in a sorry state, and needs to be redone.

Hello Faré and Tunespeople,

motivation and time lack: IMO wikis (at least wikis that I know of)
are hopeless to maintain without *huge* manual intervention.

For example, starting when CiteSeer passed from NEC to PSU[1]
(with mirror at MIT[2] and UniZh[3]) all related links on our
CTO[4] are in need of an update. So, we need to:

  a) locate each node with a link to CiteSeer;
  b) update such links, possibly agumented with a link to the
     same paper on mirrors.

Without an account on tunes.org this is impossible to do
automatically; even with such account, it is inconvenient
and error prone (you know, regular expressions sometimes
have some surprising, hard to notice, results on some texts).

So, I ask: why not morphing CTO[4] in something really TUNES-like?

As Theodor H. Nelson put it, embedded markup is to be considered
harmful[5]. There are some software which reified links and anchors,
but they are, sadly, forgotten. See for example Atlas[6] and
Hyper-G[7].

When links and nodes are in a RDBMS, manipulating the graph
structure is certainly simpler than editing text files manually
or with text processing tools: to solve the links update problem
previously stated, a simple SQL UPADATE statement suffice. Also,
referential integrity is checked immediately when an INSERT or
UPDATE is performed.

I think that a quite robust and portable solution can be obtained
starting from (ideas of, if not source code) Atlas[6], adapting
it to PostgreSQL[8] (or MonetDB[9]) and interfacing all to a web
server with FastCGI[10] (supporteed by most web servers, Apache
included).

Alternatively, has someone here some experience/knowledge about
so-called Content Management Systems (CMSs)?

Comments?


REFERENCES

 [1] CiteSeer at PSU   http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/

 [2] CiteSeer at MIT   http://citeseer.lcs.mit.edu/cs

 [3] CiteSeer at UniZh http://sherry.ifi.unizh.ch/

 [4] CTO http://cliki.tunes.org

 [5] "Embedded Markup Considered Harmful", Theodor H. Nelson
     http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.nelson.html

 [6] "Atlas Hyperlink Database Project"
     "An attempt to add referential integrity and navigation
     visualization to the World Wide Web."
     http://www.kippster.com/atlas/

     "Atlas: Supporting the Web with a Distributed Hyperlink Database"
     http://www.cc.gatech.edu/grads/j/Kipp.Jones/atlas/boston/atlas.html
     http://www.kippster.com/atlas/boston/atlas.html

     "Supporting the Web: A Distributed Hyperlink Database System"
     http://www.ra.ethz.ch/CDstore/www5/www396/overview.htm

     "Towards an Intelligent Publishing Environment"
     http://www.cc.gatech.edu/grads/j/Kipp.Jones/publish/publishing.html

     other relevant papers at Jim Pitkow's web site:
     http://www.pitkow.com/work_publications.html

     see also:
     "Automated Link Maintenance"
     http://www.w3.org/Addressing/auto-update

 [7] Hyper-G    http://cliki.tunes.org/Hyper-G

 [8] PostgreSQL http://www.postgresql.org/

 [9] MonetDB    http://monetdb.cwi.nl/Home/

[10] FastCGI    http://www.fastcgi.com/
     ".. is a language independent, scalable, open extension
      to CGI that provides high performance without the
      limitations of server specific APIs."


Best regards.

--
Massimo Dentico