[Bf-docboard] Mentioning wiki

[Peter Gervai]

Hello Bart,

Thanks for the reply!

On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 11:03:43AM +0100, Bart wrote:

> I agree with you that a Wiki is a nice collaboration tool. However, I 
> don't think it is suitable for our purposes: you are forced to work 
> on-line, wiki's usually do not have the capabilities that DocBook offers 
> us such as image inclusion (although I know there are exceptions such as 
> Twiki), and, most importantly, Wiki does not offer us the possibility to 
> export the content to a variety of output formats such as PDF and RTF.

I am sure that there are good and bad sides of both methods. 

As far as I know MediaWiki (the one I mentioned):
- you can upload prewritten content (naturally),
- you can retrieve content (with or without full modification history),
- history can help you to merge your changes, if someone have already 
  changed the part you edit (still, manual merging is unavoidable in
  every collaboration project),
- you can include pictures (internal, external),
- you can convert retrieved markup to docbook and further convert it to 
  whatever you please (this is theoretical, since I never cared to edit
  DocBook, but MediaWiki's markup have hierarchical sections, pictures,
  bold/italic/strong/emphasized typography, blockquotes, (un)numbered lists
  and probably others).

Probably it is not convenient to use by those who already editing the docs,
since you are already used to do it the old way.

But the actual way makes it hard and very inconvenient to contribute. (I
stand as an example: I do not want to open a notepad, collect all the typos
and mistakes, then go and subscribe a mailing list I am otherwise not
interested in, write an email, then monitor the list whether anyone cared to
notice my email, then wait and check from time to time whether someone
misunderstood something I wrote. I consider this pretty inconvenient. I
guess there are many people out there "just" using the program, playing with
it, and sometimes they may come up with interesting ideas for the manual,
without dedication to write manuals for ever. :))

But do not take me wrong; I stop evangelisation here. I do not want to
convince you, just wanted to share my view and what just occured to me when
I first met with the manual.

> If I am not mistaken the Open Content Licence will allow you to make a 
> copy of the material and host it somewhere else. 

However the copy and the modified material must be released under OC as
well. (No CC or GFDL possible here AFAIK.)

> I don't think that fragmenting the documentation efforc will do the
> project any good though.

I can't tell how many people would have made a small modification in the
docs if there would have been a conveninent possibility. 

(Since wiki _change history_ is logged it's not really hard to apply the
changes to the main doc body. For example MediaWiki exports the complete
history in XML, so you can get the revisions, diff them and apply the diff
to your master text.)


I hope my view helps to see more possibilities. :)

Peter