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Re: Invitation to new 'conlang' wiki

From:Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 12, 2006, 23:21
On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 02:22:38PM -0400, Paul Bennett wrote:

> -----Original Message----- > >From: Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> > > >I thought that FrathWiki ( http://wiki.frath.net/Main_Page ) was a > >kind of de-facto "Unofficial Wiki of the CONLANG-L mailing list". > > You've hit it precicely. It is *a* de-facto Wiki of the list. There are at least > two others, plus this newest one.
Of those I can think of off the top of my head, there's: 1. The Conlang and Conculture Wiki I host 2. FrathWiki 3. The LangMaker Wiki 4. AA's wiki And at least two others, *all* of which are run by people on this list. The wiki I started was *meant* to be for the more technical side of things, acting as a collaborative guide and reference for information on conlanging and conculturing. It was never meant to host languages or conculture descriptions. LangMaker already existed, if not as a wiki, so that side of thing seemed well covered. Then FrathWiki started, which overlapped with LangMaker somewhat, but allowed people who didn't have websites to host their conlangs and concultures there. Then Jeffrey got around to getting LangMaker up and running again after he had that disaster with his harddrive that destroyed the raw data for building the LangMaker site, replacing it with a Wiki. The purpose stayed the same though: acting as a conlanging Yellow Pages. And then all the others came.
> >If you're not yet too emotionally wedded to your own Wiki, I suggest > >you have a look at that -- one thing worse than having no Wiki for > >conlangs is having several dozen Wikis, each with very little content. > > I'd suggest that someone or ones with a stern hand but a fair eye go > over the extant conlang Wikis, and combine them into a single, slightly > more de-jure, source. I suspect it would be a legthy as well as > difficult task, though. I suggest instead that we hold some kind of > referendum to determine our preferred Wiki (or indeed whether a unified > Wiki is desirable), and each take responsibility to move our own content > to a unified new home, if needed.
Here, here! The only reason I started my wiki was because there were no others. Then after I started it, FrathWiki started up (which had a slightly different purpose), and then along came a veritable hoard of the things. I'd happily close down mine and replace it with redirects if we were to standardise on a preferred wiki. FrathWiki gets my vote: aside from the one I set up, it's the oldest, and the software running it--MediaWiki--is better than mine.
> Alternatively, the process could probably be automated with wget, expect, > and perl, though that might be a nightmare to actually implement.
The nightmare doesn't arise so much from walking the wikis, as how exactly you resolve page names. That gives me a headache just thinking about it. K. -- Keith Gaughan - kmgaughan@eircom.net - http://talideon.com/ Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash. -- Winston Churchill