migrating to mediawiki

[Brian Rice]

On Oct 19, 2005, at 8:47 PM, Massimo Dentico wrote:

>> 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?

Hello? The only reason the wiki is locked down is because the  
software can't handle spam. Mediawiki can handle spam. Link  
translation is not hard - it can be handled. Even if we have to lose  
a bunch of links and reviews, who cares? I don't even use CTO any  
more because I can't stand signing in to fix it. Also it duplicates  
rather poorly a lot of Wikipedia info. ALSO, LTU will be making a  
wiki and handling the Citeseer issues for us.

> 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?

Oh. Sure, I absolutely agree. BUT WHO'S GOING TO CODE IT?

Slate doesn't exist for no reason - object-based multimedia is  
supposed to be in there. Put your money where your mouth is, Massimo,  
and CONTRIBUTE!

Notably, a CMS is one project that could be done with the CLIM-ish UI  
project of Slate. I am not going to explain what a CMS is - look it  
up. Squeak has half a one called SmallWiki2, but it is very  
incomplete. The others in python and so forth are big and bulky for  
language reasons. I have a friend who hosts Plone installations and  
he hates it and always asks me when I'll have one in Slate ready.

My conclusion: help get some of this wikimedia migration done, or  
write software, or shut up.

--
-Brian