Re: Invitation to new 'conlang' wiki

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