[Python-ideas] Encouraging more use of the Python wiki

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 07.01.2015 17:55, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 10:23 AM, Wes Turner <mailto:wes.turner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Are there tools for working with a regular editor (such as vim) and
>> MoinMoin pages?
> 
> I'm not at all concerned with this, as I see the editing step being
> pretty much orthogonal to the markup language and the version control
> tools. Editing through a web browser pretty much sucks no matter what
> you're trying to edit, especially if you are used to using highly
> functional, mature editors like vim and Emacs. If you want your editing
> to happen outside a glorified <textarea> widget, find an "offline"
> editing plugin. (I happen to use Edit with Emacs from Chrome, but
> there are other extensions available.)
> 
> I assume that MoinMoin will eventually be supplanted by some other
> (wiki?) technology. I do think it's worth noting though, that while
> Github and other version control services are all the rage for all
> sorts of collaborative editing, wikis in general predate that sort of
> technology by a long way. If I read correctly, the original C2 Wiki
> was launched in 1995, MoinMoin in 2000, Git in 2005, and Github
> not until 2007. See:
> 
>     * http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory
>     * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoinMoin
>     * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)
>     * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub
> 
> It's only more recently developed wiki systems (or perhaps a few wiki
> systems whose authors were prescient and saw DVCSs coming) which
> support generic version control backends.
> 
> I think I posted a link yesterday which looked like a reasonable
> starting point for converting MoinMoin markup to Markdown. Run with
> that if you want. If you can parse MoinMoin markup and generate
> Markdown, it shouldn't be too difficult to iterate over all the pages
> and their iterations in wiki.python.org, convert to Markdown, then
> commit to a Github repo.

... and then you've changed the technology, lost the dynamic features
of wikis, the permission controls, full text search, but have not
solved the real issues, only created more work that's not relevant
to the content.

> I think MoinMoin has served the Python community pretty well. Despite
> its apparent unpopularity, I think structural and content issues are
> more important than the markup syntax used for that content or the
> version control scheme implemented in the backend.

In the end, it all boils down to people curating content. The
tools, the markup and version control are all secondary.

My recommendation: look through the wiki pages, grab some that
are older and some care, and improve them. That's going help
much more than this tools discussion.

Here's starting point:
https://wiki.python.org/moin/WikiGuidelines

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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