migrating to mediawiki

[Massimo Dentico]

> Hello?

I'm here and well awake.


> The only reason the wiki is locked down is because the  
> software can't handle spam. Mediawiki can handle spam.

I know.


> 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.

I was pointing out only 2 fundamental and well-known (by decades)
flaws (complete lack of referential integrity and embedded mark-up
-- the first was even considered an advantage by Tim B. Lee), not
specific to wikis, but to the web in general, a wrongly designed
hypermedia system.

I was proposing to take advantage of this transition to move
toward a system along the lines expressed in "Tunes Distributed
Publishing":

  http://tunes.org/Interfaces/tunesvswww.html

instead of insisting with the crap the Web usually is (even
if we can use *some* of its infrastructure while subverting it).

So, my proposal is fully in the scope of this project.


> Also it duplicates rather poorly a lot of Wikipedia info.

I'm not afraid of throwing away some of our content in favor
of some other better exposition of the same *content*. But
while Wikipedia is sometimes better in content, it is not better
in *structuring* and *managing* such content, both manually but,
more importantly, automatically as much as possible.

The license of Wikipedia permits us to reuse its content and,
I think, we can do this automatically while reshaping it (giving
up with the concept of "document", to allow a user to re-assemble
fragments as needed -- I have a paper about this precisely, but
I don't have the reference at hand).

There are other fields worth exploration, for example, automatic
categorization.


> ALSO, LTU will be making a wiki and handling the Citeseer issues
> for us.

Again, I'm in favor of reusing good (or better than our) *content*.


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

I'm here to see if there is interest and if we can agree at least
on some fundamental design choices. Without these preconditions
it is impossible to form a group of contributors.

Anyway, we don't need only "coders" and I don't want to collaborate
with people who produce tons of code, especially without thinking,
proper design and coordination with the group -- note that I'm not
against occasional short sessions of exploratory programming.


> Slate doesn't exist for no reason - object-based multimedia is  
> supposed to be in there.

I was somewhat interested about Slate; no more now for a variety
of reasons which I will not discuss here or in other places because,
I'm sure, it would be unproductive.


> Put your money where your mouth is, Massimo, and CONTRIBUTE!

Sorry, I'm rather poor; I'm only typing and I usually prefer
to put my mouth in front of a nice... well, I don't want to shock
the purest so I'll stop here (I recognized the idiom.. I'm only
joking).

 
> Notably, a CMS is one project that could be done with the CLIM-ish UI  
> project of Slate.

See above about Slate.


> I am not going to explain what a CMS is - look it up.

Thank you, I'm able to use search engines quite effectively. I was
asking if someone know a CSM that is worth looking into (if not using):
I'm not impressed at all by what I read on the subject.


> 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.

So my impressions were right, after all, and saved me much time.


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


I will contribute software if and only if I think we will do it
in a proper way, based on the right foundational knowledge otherwise
is a waste of my time.

Also, unfortunately, I have no time to do this alone.... and with
my crappy English I'm not in the position to manage such project
anyway.

I will try to put togheter interesting ideas from previous work
and literature in a working prototype, but I don't want to make
promises I cannot keep; so go with WikiMedia, at least for now
and good luck.


Brian Rice, in another e-mail, wrote:

> The lone-wolf TUNES implementor is a FOOL.

Therefore, you are making me a FOOL, oh wel...


Regards.

--
Massimo Dentico