MediaWiki instead of Trac Wiki?

Christian Stimming stimming at tuhh.de
Tue Nov 29 05:22:23 EST 2005


Actually I'm still unsure whether we really should start maintaining a 
non-trivial wiki on svn.gnucash.org (I hope this question doesn't sound 
blasphemic by now).

Currently we have online documentation about gnucash at the following 
places, which are all maintained differently:

1. http://www.gnucash.org/
2. the gnucash-docs svn module, online copy at 
http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v1.8/C/gnucash-help/help.html
3. http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GnuCash

The places #1 and #2 by definition have strictly limited access and slow 
update-cycles and there are good reasons for that (although major parts 
of #1 are outdated and need to be overhauled or moved to the wiki). The 
place #3 on the other hand is truly a wiki in the wiki sense -- everyone 
can create an account on gnomesupport.org and therefore start to 
contribute. The spam issue exists there but it is manageable [1]. How 
would the Trac wiki fit into this picture? I don't think we should add 
this as a fourth place for gnucash. Also I do think we should have a 
wiki that doesn't require manual account creation by the maintainer, but 
should instead have a quite low entry barrier for contributions from 
new/lurking/fringe/whatever contributors.

So the question now is: Which server do we want to use for a wiki in the 
long-term? Either continue with gnomesupport.org or fully switch to our 
own wiki server? Actually it would be good to hear from the 
gnomesupport.org admin whether he (stro) really wants to continue 
gnomesupport.org (email sent; will post reply to list). Gnucash makes up 
approx. 80% of the content there [2], although quite recently one user 
called "Macv" copied a lot of general content from wikipedia [3], but 
apart from that there is virtually zero content there.

I'm quite agnostic to this actual question - either one of the wiki 
servers would be fine IMHO. I do think that we should decide on one of 
them though, and I do think that our wiki should be quite open to 
contributions, similar to the current gnomesupport policy.

Christian


[1] gnomesupport.org has a spammer visiting maybe every other week. You 
cannot contribute anonymously but you have to create an account. If any 
account causes spam, the admins have that super-fast rollback function 
on a per-account basis, so it's only a matter of one click to revert 
spam of one account. Currently I'm the only active admin and it's 
sufficient that I spend 1 minute every other day to check for and fix 
that spam. So that's a bearable effort.

[2] http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Popularpages
[3] http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Newpages

Derek Atkins schrieb:
> Didier Vidal <didier-devel at 9online.fr> writes:
> 
> 
>>I'm a MediaWiki fan. I would welcome such a move if it doesn't slow down
>>the server performances.


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