ILP Wiki

Meta
1

I’m proposing to create A Wiki for ILP and ILP membres.

How to:
There are many free and good wiki soft and I can write/modify one if needed, too.
I think it’s good to have “Common” pages editable by any member, “Rules and other items” editable by mods only, and then “Member pages” than an only be edited by each member.

Benefits:
We can make lists of threads categorized by subjects, interests, and so on, making them more accessible for new and old members (and even non members). Although we can use the search, google, and other methods, Wiki type community effort may result in much easier index/list.

It’s very easy for wikipage to cache the data and serve it statically, helping to reduce the server load, which has direct impact on usability of the site, as well as on the cost of site operation.

Member pages would allow other members to get to know someone in efficient manner, avoiding common misunderstanding and resulting conflicts.
It ca serve as personal memo and thought organization tool, helping us to clarify what we are interested.

Cost:
As far as choosing, installing, and technical maintenance goes, it can be very small.
The impact on the server can be minimized, too, and it’s not that difficult.
I can help in the technical area as I was a consultant/programmer for this kind of things.

Moderation on Wiki isn’t very difficult. As it can save the log of all editing, reverting to older version can be done instantly. And basic maintenance is done by members (discussing the matter in the forum) that I don’t think moderators need to spend lots of additional time on it.
Probably, we can limit the right to edit Wiki to someone who has 10 posts (in the forum) or so to reduce the risk of spamming to near zero.

2

I made (unofficial) ILP Wiki, as I didn’t want to wait for possible official one.
It’s open for anyone. With the username/password, you can edit, search, etc, too.
PM me if someone wants to try out.

(Unofficial) ILP Wiki
mini.dreamhosters.com/
(It’s hosted on free domain name, for now)

3

This is in discussion with the staff atm, btw.
We’re pretty excited about the concept; just doing the 'ol democratic debate chewing stage now.
Just thought you should know.

4

Thank you for the information.
If the official wiki starts, it would be great.

It’s really not so difficult and the server load can be kept very low if we use the setup like I did for the Unofficial ILP Wiki.

The code I used is an open source software and free, too.
There are many free good Wiki software, too.
I chose it because it’s very simple (less than 1000 lines of Python code) and easy to understand and modify. It’s very light compared to some PHP based one and other Python/Perl based one.

I started mining old but interesting threads, too.
There are some interesting discussion starting back in 2001 as you can see in;
mini.dreamhosters.com/SomethingAndNothing.html
mini.dreamhosters.com/ThePhilosophy.html

And also info from other sources;
mini.dreamhosters.com/CognitiveScience.html

5

We’re discussing a secondary unmentioned proposition in league with the wiki; this is the cause of the hesitation as the time is such that staff presence is in flux from travel.

6

By the way, something that I haven’t mentioned before.
Regarding Nah joining the staff for technical help, that he obviously wishes to lend, Nah would make getting Symposia up and running far easier.

7

I was wandering about what happened to Symposia, time to time.
If Carleas and staffs want, I can offer desired way/level of technical help for any project.
It can be one time thing or more persistent one, as desired.
I can offer technical advices or I can code everything or in between.
You can simply let me know of what is needed and current situation when/if you want me to start.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue mining some old but interesting threads in url=http://mini.dreamhosters.com/FrontPage.html ILP Wiki[/url] when I have time.

8

I am interested in a wiki, I think you’re right that it would do a lot to make discussions more productive and less redundant.

What I’d like though, and what’s really stalled what efforts I’ve made towards that end, is a system that combines the user database from the forums into the wiki and Symposia. All three should revolve around the forums, because that’s what ILP has always been and it seems valuable to keep it that way. Many users have put a lot of time into building virtual identities here, and that should carry over into e.g. credibility in wiki edits. Do you know anything about combining databases that way?

Security is important, the old Symposia came down because it got hacked. Is Monkey Wiki open source?

If you’d like to work on this, that would be awesome. If you think it would be worthwhile, we could import what you’ve already setup, or we could start from scratch. We did a little work with Joomla and Drupal, but it didn’t really go anywhere. I have a Joomla database with all the old Symposia articles, as well as the original ArticleDashboard database (but I’m pretty sure that’s encrypted; AD is terrible in so many ways).

9

Unless it’s technically too complicated, anything can be done.

I totally agree. I also like writing in forum (with forum type interface), somehow.

I’ve used phpbb a bit in the past, and I think we can do it.
We can clean up the database of older portion of forum, too, as quotes are showing up as visible escape code or something (probably due to conversion from older version of MySQL or phpBB, or the change of code page, UTF, etc).

I understand. I still manage a few sites, and one of them is treating sensitive issues and I designed all security features for it.

Yes. GPL or LGPL. We can do anything with it, as long as we are just using it and not distributing.

I think we should first take a good look at what you have as the data for Symposia, etc.
And we should evaluate the situation of server load/allowance, to make sure what kind of design priority we should set (to make the system very light, or more fancy/attractive, etc).
Then, probably we can choose the infrastructure/language/setup to use;

  • if we are using very simple stand alone system like monkey wiki,
  • if we are using framework like Ruby on rail, djiango, etc,
  • if we are using PHP (big and slow and may eat lots of resource), Perl (small and fast but somewhat archaic), Python (very easy to read and understand, but less faster/smaller than Perl), OCaml (very fast and small but les easier to learn), C/C++ (fast and small but can be tedious to works with), or any other language,
  • if we are using database backend or file system
    and so on.

And the decision is usually based on the server capacity and current (and projected) access/traffic including possibly heavy hits from search engine bots (and intentional attacks, if any), to begin with. And then we can think of desired features.

In the case of Unofficial ILP Wiki, I chose the monkey wiki because I already knew the code and thus I can set it up quickly without much effort, and it can be very light (thus not much impact on the server it’s sharing with other sites), and the very basic feature sets were enough for my taste (and I can add any feature by myself if I want in future).

For the official ILP wiki, there might be other members who love to have certain specific features. So, I don’t know yet what’s the best setup.

If we have Joomla DB, I think we can export/convert from it.
I can probably write a script that would convert from joomla DB to one of wiki format.

But first thing would be knowing available server resource and desired feature set.
I’m guessing from the occasional latency of the response that we may not have lots of room for the server resource. Maybe we can take a look at the possible ways to further optimize the forum, too.

For the desired features, interested members can take a look at different wikis (like heavy but feature rich Wikipedia powered by MediaWiki and any other wikis), and come up with features they want.