Re: Building up a new *user* wiki!

[Amitai Schlair <schmonz%schmonz.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 1:02 PM, Julian Djamil Fagir 
<gnrp%komkon2.de@localhost> wrote:

> Which is the wiki software to go for? ikiwiki would be the one you could
> migrate as easy as possible to the NetBSD wiki when it is ready.

To me, this is the key decision-making factor -- not for technical
reasons, but for human ones.

It's unfortunate but true that today, the fastest way to let NetBSD
users contribute to a wiki is to set one up for the purpose. Letting
them contribute to wiki.netbsd.org will take technical work, of
course, as will the eventual migration of the content.

It's also true that no wiki goes far without willing contributors. If
the ultimate goal here is truly for users to someday contribute to
wiki.n.o, then we need to be persuasive twice: (1) inducing people to
write for this temporary user wiki, and (2) inducing them to move to
wiki.n.o when the time comes.

If the ultimate goal isn't user participation at wiki.n.o, then these
concerns aren't terribly important, and the wiki can be anything it
wants. Otherwise, a user-editable wiki should work just like the one
we want them to eventually join. A user wiki that's an ikiwiki
requires people to learn the UI and text-formatting rules once for
(1), and makes the investment worthwhile by preserving the relevance
of their skills when (2) arrives.

Fossil is a great tool, as is MediaWiki. As humans, we get to choose
the best tool for the job. I think the "job" here should be to build a
participatory community around NetBSD, in which case ikiwiki is the
one wiki system that really makes any contextual sense.