Kwiki on Wikipedia
hash...@gmail.com
As #kwiki users know, the entry on Wikipedia about Kwiki was deleted
because it doesn't have reliable sources and because "Kwiki is not
notable".
In the other hand, SocialText entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialtext
does not have reliable sources as well, and is not notable as well (it
doesn't refer any document relating to Socialtext notability).
But SocialText entry was not deleted. I found out why:
Socialtext [...] It also donated US$2,000 in the Wikimedia Fundraiser 2005 Q4.
So, you can BUY your entry on wikipedia :-(
Cheers
--
Alberto Simões
Whiteg
a draft not a real policy yet),
"Software applications are products, and fall under
Wikipedia:Notability (companies and corporations). This page gives
rough guidelines which Wikipedia editors use to decide if certain
software applications should have an article on Wikipedia."
Frankly speaking, even I myself don't think Kwiki is a product..^^
However, SocialText is company, which implies SocialText wiki is a
product. In fact, all the pages of wikisystems developed by
commercial companies are kept on wikipedia, but other (open source/
free) wikisystems are not so lucky. Kwiki is not the only one.
Cheers
Whiteg
Lars Aronsson
> As #kwiki users know, the entry on Wikipedia about Kwiki was deleted
> because it doesn't have reliable sources and because "Kwiki is not
> notable".
I'm not a kwiki user, only a hangaround on this list. I also
happen to be a hangaround on several of the mailing lists of
Wikipedia.
This winter, "notability" is a great issue. People who are not
serious contributors to Wikipedia are adding entries on their
school, their street and their cousin. The way to fight this
abuse is to require that articles should describe "notable" items.
If you have something serious to write, you must provide some
simple evidence that the topic is notable. The article must
mention in some verifyable way why this topic is interesting and
relevant enough. For kwiki this shouldn't be hard, I guess.
Look around at articles describing comparable objects to get some
ideas. I know too little to write the kwiki article myself, but I
have written many other articles and never had any problems with
the notability requirement.
> Socialtext [...] It also donated US$2,000 in the Wikimedia Fundraiser 2005 Q4.
>
> So, you can BUY your entry on wikipedia :-(
This is plain wrong and your accusation is stupid. Donation or
not, there is no doubt that Socialtext is notable enough. The
current article on Socialtext is surprisingly short, though. The
mentioning in the article of their donation is not something I
would have included there. Would it be appropriate, from kwiki's
viewpoint, to write about kwiki as a section in the article on
Socialtext?
--
Lars Aronsson (la...@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
hash...@gmail.com
On 2/1/07, Lars Aronsson <la...@aronsson.se> wrote:
> > Socialtext [...] It also donated US$2,000 in the Wikimedia Fundraiser 2005 Q4.
> >
> > So, you can BUY your entry on wikipedia :-(
>
> This is plain wrong and your accusation is stupid. Donation or
> not, there is no doubt that Socialtext is notable enough. The
> current article on Socialtext is surprisingly short, though. The
> mentioning in the article of their donation is not something I
> would have included there. Would it be appropriate, from kwiki's
> viewpoint, to write about kwiki as a section in the article on
> Socialtext?
Well, there are LOT of stories about buying wikipedia. I do not want
to accuse wikipedia, specially I really use it, and I think it is a
great project.
But the truth is that if you look at Socialtext entry there is NOTHING
notable about it. It just refers a company (that's not notable), their
authors, and nothing more. Kwiki in the other hand had (at least) an
interview in a Oreilly forum.
Anyway, if I was accusing wikipedia I would not mail kwiki mailing
list but rather wikipedia ones.
Cheers
Alberto
--
Alberto Simões
Ingy dot Net
> Alberto Simões wrote:
>
> > As #kwiki users know, the entry on Wikipedia about Kwiki was deleted
> > because it doesn't have reliable sources and because "Kwiki is not
> > notable".
>
> I'm not a kwiki user, only a hangaround on this list. I also
> happen to be a hangaround on several of the mailing lists of
> Wikipedia.
>
> This winter, "notability" is a great issue. People who are not
> serious contributors to Wikipedia are adding entries on their
> school, their street and their cousin. The way to fight this
> abuse is to require that articles should describe "notable" items.
> If you have something serious to write, you must provide some
> simple evidence that the topic is notable. The article must
> mention in some verifyable way why this topic is interesting and
> relevant enough. For kwiki this shouldn't be hard, I guess.
> Look around at articles describing comparable objects to get some
> ideas. I know too little to write the kwiki article myself, but I
> have written many other articles and never had any problems with
> the notability requirement.
What this really comes down to is that a single Wikipedia moderator,
Earle Martin, who is also a Perl CPAN author, and who has also worked on
a different wiki framework on CPAN, has decided to take it upon himself
to remove various pages referring to or related to me, Ingy döt Net.
There once was a page about me specifically. I surmise that he felt I
was not worthy of a page. But there was the uncomfortable fact that two
other Wikipedia project pages referred to Ingy döt Net. So he had to
remove those first. Those pages were about YAML and Kwiki. There was
also a page called Rock_dots,in which a mention of the gratuitous umlaut
in my last name was removed.
Mr Martin was obviously not concerned about the Kwiki page as notable
wiki software itself, or he would have deleted a lot of other Wikipedia
pages about wiki software. Most pages about wiki projects are not
notable by this criteria.
Let's look for a second at some notable facts about Kwiki:
* On CPAN since 2003.
* http://cpan.org
* Over 200 plugin modules on CPAN by over a dozen authors.
* http://search.cpan.org/search?m=module&q=kwiki
* Used by almost every YAPC conference since 2003.
* http://yapcchicago.org/wiki/index.cgi
* Used by every OSCON conference since 2003.
* http://oscon.kwiki.org
* Used consistently by O'Reilly as their conference wiki of choice.
* http://wiki.oreillynet.com/wiki/railsconf2007/
* Subject of an O'Reilly interview.
* http://osdir.com/Article1534.phtml
* Was the base software that Socialtext was built on.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialtext
This seems like enough notability to warrant a Kwiki page on
Wikipedia. I'm sure we could find more facts, but most other pages
about wiki software have nothing notable on them. For example, this
Perl-based wiki:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiwiki
I haven't even gone into Kwiki's unique and/or interesting feature list,
which in my mind is more important than proving worthiness.
Last week some Kwiki people tried to make a new Kwiki page on Wikipedia,
but Mr Martin got it deleted. I'm not sure what to do next.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kwiki
Kwiki will be fine without a Wikipedia page, but still it doesn't seem right
that one person, with whom I have no quarrel, can decide to get rid of it.
--Ingy
Mike808
It is hard to determine which wiki engines are the most popular, although a
list of lead candidates might include
TWiki<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWiki>,
MoinMoin <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoinMoin>,
PmWiki<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PmWiki>,
DokuWiki <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DokuWiki> and
MediaWiki<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki>(Google
trend history comparison<http://www.google.com/trends?q=TWiki%2C+MoinMoin%2C+PmWiki%2C+MediaWiki%2C+DokuWiki&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all>).
A list of some of those available is included below, and another can be
found at Wiki:WikiEngines <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines>.
I guess "notable" is being judged by the same nebulous criteria as
"popular".
I find it interesting EM's comment:
it doesn't pass the main criterion proposed at
WP:SOFTWARE<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SOFTWARE>(a Google
search <http://www.google.com/search?q=Kwiki+-site%3Akwiki.org+-CPAN>doesn't
reveal any non-trivial published works). This new version of the
article also spends most of its time describing what is supposed to happen
in the next version. WP:NOT a crystal
ball<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_crystal_ball>.
-- Earle Martin <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Earle_Martin>
[t<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Earle_Martin>
/c <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Earle_Martin>] 21:15,
23 January 2007 (UTC)
I did the google search linked: Personalized Results *1* - *10* of about *
532,000* for *Kwiki -site:kwiki.org -CPAN*. (*0.29* seconds)
Not sure what EM used as the criteria are for "non-trivial" when there are
over 1/2 million results on Google. And that's only where Kwiki was
identified in the content of the sites indexed. And we all know that Google
does not index the entire Internet, as many knowledge repositories are
either not searchable by Google, or they are simply Intranet sites not
connected to the Internet.
I'm sure that with Ingy's list of notable sites using Kwiki and articles
written about it, perhaps a page similar to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWiki can be proposed.
BTW, ArchLUG <http://www.archlug.org/kwiki/> has been running Kwiki since
launching (2002?) and is considered the primary community site for the
Xandros community external to Xandros itself, and has been since its launch
as a Linux distribution.
Also, it is odd that this page references Kwiki as having a notable text
parser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software#Perl-based
The IkiWiki article listed has also been marked as "non-notable" and
requested deletion.
I'm not sure that this article describes anything that Kwiki doesn't do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PodWiki
Perhaps it's next on the list of deletion for "non-notability" on the list
of Perl-based wiki engines.
FYI -- the link on MeatBallWiki to Earle's WikiBot is broken, and the actual
page hasn't been updated since March 2004,
http://downlode.org/Code/Perl/bots/wikibot/
IIRC, EM originally contributed the IRCBot plugin but subsequently removed
it. This was back when Spoon was with us. Not sure what his beef is with
Ingy.
There may also be an angle into notability due to Ingy's authoring the
IO::Spiffy modules and numerous public presentations on technologies and
modules that he's authored. Of which Kwiki is the premier POC for. I would
agree that they're certainly more notable than a few CGI::Wiki plugin
modules with limited, niche functionality when compared to frameworks and
foundation modules that expand the capabilities of the Perl programmer and
community.
How many downloads from CPAN constitutes "notable"?
Mike808/
--
sed '/^[when][coders]/!d
/^...[discover].$/d
/^..[real].[code]$/!d
' /usr/share/dict/words
Tim Sweetman
> I did the google search linked: Personalized Results *1* - *10* of about *
> 532,000* for *Kwiki -site:kwiki.org -CPAN*. (*0.29* seconds)
The great majority of those are junk: data from CPAN, error reports,
lists of packages.
Where are the articles describing what kwiki is, what kwiki does? There
are maybe one or two, but they're (a) several years old, and (b) written
by Ingy.
Stuff about what Kwiki 2.0 is going to do next is original research, and
shouldn't be on wikipedia. It probably should be on kwiki.org, or
somewhere...
Hell, what about Ingy's declaration:
> [from ingy's email, 8/1/2007]
> Kwiki is *not* a zombie. Well maybe it is, but it has started walking
> around again, and is preparing for a major resurrection!
>
> Kwiki 2.0. It's available now and working well.
... but that's only on the web as email archive, and it's written by
Ingy! ("Notable" seems to mean "thought notable by people other than its
creators")
> There may also be an angle into notability due to Ingy's authoring the
> IO::Spiffy modules and numerous public presentations on technologies and
> modules that he's authored. Of which Kwiki is the premier POC for. I would
> agree that they're certainly more notable than a few CGI::Wiki plugin
> modules with limited, niche functionality when compared to frameworks and
> foundation modules that expand the capabilities of the Perl programmer and
> community.
I think that's probably the wrong way up. Lots of computer-literate
people have some idea what a wiki is, so you can explain to them "kwiki
is wiki software". Wiki software that is in wide use, or does anything
particularly special, which has been documented somewhere on the web or
in other literature which can be cited, not by its chief developer,
would be noteable, yes?
On the other hand, plenty of Perl programmers zone out if you start
talking about Spiffy (http://cpanratings.perl.org/dist/Spiffy). This
stuff is very, very, very specialised.
> How many downloads from CPAN constitutes "notable"?
There's very little here, and rightly so, I guess:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Perl_modules
Tim
Mike808
>
> Where are the articles describing what kwiki is, what kwiki does? There
> are maybe one or two, but they're (a) several years old, and (b) written
> by Ingy.
Well, if the product documentation is sufficient to actually use, what would
be the purpose of such an article, and how would it differ from the
documentation?
I think there aren't many articles because people heard about it, decided to
use it, found that it worked exactly as advertised, and wasn't so
complicated to use that it needed articles written about it.
Maybe there is some sort of Perl Journal (hint, hint) or something that
publishes articles about Perl modules and someone might submit an article
about Kwiki. Can someone talk Alligator Descartes or BDF or maybe Andy
Lester (see below) or some other well-known contributor to those sorts of
publications to contribute an article on Kwiki?
I found this on the Feb 2005 issue of TPJ:
Phalanx Marches On
Andy Lester has reorganized his Phalanx project, an effort to add tests to
CPAN modules, find hidden bugs, and improve documentation. When his initial
group of 12 testers, each working alone, failed to produce any additional
tests, Andy decided to make the project more community-oriented. A web site
has been put up at http://qa.perl.org/phalanx/; a wiki has been organized at
http://phalanx.kwiki.org/; and a perl-qa list is hosted at lists.perl.org.
And this one by Andy Lester in May 2004:
Wikis
The OSCON wiki was a huge success. A wiki is a web-based hypertext
information store that lets anyone modify pages on the fly. The wiki was
created weeks before the start of the convention, and was updated by
literally hundreds of users. Some contributed only their names to the list
of attendees, while others maintained elaborate lists of Birds-of-a-Feather
sessions. It became the electronic equivalent of a bulletin board, but far
more interactive.
Brian Ingerson has become quite an evangelist for wikis. His CGI::Kwiki has
made a convert out of me, now that I've seen it in action. He's also created
Test::Fit, for integrating Perl's testing framework into a wiki based on the
Fit testing framework.
CGI::Kwiki: http://search.cpan.org/dist/CGI-Kwiki/
OSCON wiki: http://oscon.kwiki.org
Fit: http://fit.c2.com/
But neither the phalanx or oscon projects would show up in the google search
that EM referenced, since it excludes the entire kwiki.org domain. Maybe
Ingy should look into moving the "Kwiki farm" sites off of kwiki.org and
maybe onto kwiki.net? That might result in a google search that returned
more "notable" results.
The old locations could all be redirected with some simple mod_rewrite
directives, and then get Google to index the new site locations.
... but that's only on the web as email archive, and it's written by
> Ingy! ("Notable" seems to mean "thought notable by people other than its
> creators")
And apparently also "as agreed to by the page editor"
Wiki software that is in wide use, or does anything
> particularly special, which has been documented somewhere on the web or
> in other literature which can be cited, not by its chief developer,
> would be noteable, yes?
And kwiki is mentioned on many "wiki engine software" lists and
cross-reference sites.
On the other hand, plenty of Perl programmers zone out if you start
> talking about Spiffy (http://cpanratings.perl.org/dist/Spiffy). This
> stuff is very, very, very specialised.
OK, I see your point. But then again, so are articles like this one on the
Hubble FGS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Guidance_Sensor ).
Yeah, infrastructure is hard, and yes, it is specialized.
But when you get it right, it's pure craft in action.
But that doesn't stop loads of content (good and bad) being put on the net
about other infrastructure projects that do strange and magical things with
a programming language ( e.g. Java and Groovy, or DHTML, JavaScript and
AJAX, or Ruby and Rails).
Mike808/
P.S. -- sorry to Tim since you're getting this twice.