An experimental Wiki for parrot development

[Mitchell N Charity]

I've long wondered whether having a wiki, a place to put things, might
aid parrot development. A place to easily collaborate on documentation.
To record thoughts which might help others. To point at resources.

So, to help us explore the possibilities, there is now

An experimental Wiki for Parrot VM development
http://www.vendian.org/parrot/wiki/

I've primed it with a few things, and will add some more over time.
Anyone can create and edit the wiki web pages. I encourage you to
come play.

Mitchell

[1] At a minimum, this will help accumulate material for the coming
update of www.parrotcode.org.

[Stéphane Payrard]

On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 06:35:12PM -0400, Mitchell N Charity wrote:
> I've long wondered whether having a wiki, a place to put things, might
> aid parrot development. A place to easily collaborate on documentation.
> To record thoughts which might help others. To point at resources.
>
> So, to help us explore the possibilities, there is now
>
> An experimental Wiki for Parrot VM development
> http://www.vendian.org/parrot/wiki/
>
> I've primed it with a few things, and will add some more over time.
> Anyone can create and edit the wiki web pages. I encourage you to
> come play.

I found one central concept of Wikis very insufficient: wikiwords
http://www.vendian.org/parrot/wiki/bin/view.cgi/TWiki/WikiWord

A wikiword is a way to explicit create a link without the hassle of
creating an HTML anchor. The idea should be taken further to avoid
even thinking to make a link.

One would register simple words (VM, PMC, coroutine...) as page topic
and, for each page, the wiki would automatically link the first
occurence of each registered word to the page created for this word.
Linking each occurence would clutter the page.

This improvment would not replace wikiwords but would supplement them.

I don't know how difficult it would be to do.

--
stef

[Mitchell N Charity]

Stephane Payrard writes:
I found one central concept of Wikis very insufficient: wikiwords

[... an alternative ...]

I don't know how difficult it would be to do.

Hmm, that sounds like wiki research.

Which I'll leave to others.

The parrot development wiki simply uses off-the-shelf wiki technology.
Specifically, it is a TWiki, http://twiki.org/ , with only minor mods.
And the parrot related hacks are all isolated in a plugin. A primary
objective was to keep the wiki itself off-the-shelf, and low maintenance.

Sorry,
Mitchell

Briefly going off topic, and emphasizing that this has nothing to do
with the parrot wiki (after all, it's been over 4 lines since I last
mentioned it:), wiki tech could certainly be improved. Though there
seems to be something of a sweet spot. The utility of alternatives is
commonly explored and demonstrated by experimental wiki implementations.
Often these are patched versions of existing wikis, such as UseModWiki.
If you are interested, MeatballWiki http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl
might be a place to start.