Wiki As Reference

Somewhere on ShouldTopBeBanned, PeterLynch refers to the use of this wiki for reference.

Now it is sometimes said that Wiki is not Wikipedia, so it is not attempting to be comprehensive. What it can be is authoritative in its chosen field. I believe that it has been in the past, and can be now and in the future. However that is not a static thing. New ideas come along, new software develops, and new experience is formed. All of that needs careful and thoughtful editing into the fabric of what is already here, of which there is a lot. No one has the time to do everything, but if a number of people weave ideas into new fabric, the authoritative nature is developed. Sometimes that can be done just by improving the links between things which are already here, but the strands never got linked up.

One of the problems of this is that the people who can most benefit from the wiki as reference are often not the ones who can most easily spot the needs. So it requires a degree of commitment to the ideas to benefit the whole community.

There must be around on here quite a lot of arguments and discussions which once the dust has settled can be revisited to see whether there are some threads not apparent in the heat of discussion which can be brought together.

I hope this helps. -- JohnFletcher

No one has commented on this. Here is an example of how things can grow. Someone started a page on CoMonads, which I had never heard of, but looked interesting to me. A bit of work has thrown up some references and also lead me to HaskellArrows. A few links into HaskellLanguage and FunctionalReactiveProgramming and I now know about some work which I had not heard of before, but which links to my interests. It is now linked in such a way that anyone interested in monads will come across it fairly easily. -- JohnFletcher

Perhaps part of the problem is that there aren't enough WikiGnomes running around converting all the ThreadMode pages into ThesisAntithesisSynthesis. Such conversion would probably make a lot of the huge pages much smaller, and a lot of the currently RantMode discussions less strident in their nature by distilling out the pertinent concepts into bullet points. More Gnomage needed, Wikizens. Please participate.

Thank you for responding to this page. I have had a look around at the backlinks of pages such as EditHint and there is certainly plenty of scope for useful activity. -- JohnFletcher

WikiFilterist argues that the existence of messy discussion pages is not the problem, but rather the lack of ability to easily filter them out if desired is the problem. Ideally, if one wants only reference topics, they can pick reference topics. If they want to study opinions, they can select an "opinion" check-mark, or what-not.

One of the things about this wiki is that there may be people who read it and don't edit. I would rather that such people have a good experience and find things. I have been trying to help that experience by making links which I think will help. I also attempt to keep factual matters, like the versions of public domain software, up to date, although this task is never going to be complete. I rejoice when I come across something I did some years ago and have forgotten about. I also find things I did not know about before, which is also fun. -- JohnFletcher

CategoryWikiMaintenance