[linux-audio-user] the Linux soundapps pages redux

[Ruth A. Kramer]

Steve Harris wrote:
> Edits by anonymous users needs to be acked by someone, registered users
> edits go up immediatly IIUC. I think this is roughly how wikipedia works.

That might be how wikipedia works (I haven't tried it in quite a while)
but the more traditional wiki way is that user's edits go up immediately
(some wikis can require registration, but the more wiki way is not to
require registration).  Then (in the traditional wiki way) the community
around the wiki takes care of vetting the content -- if someone starts
putting up trash (I mean real trash, "graffiti", or similar), in an
active wiki community, somebody will delete that (revert the page, or
similar).  If it's just "poor" content, somebody will come along to
improve it.

It doesn't work 100%, but I am pleasantly surprised at how well it does
work on active wikis.  (WikiLearn is not quite active enough to benefit
(fully) from those effects.)

(sorry--I deleted the attribution for the following:)
> > I hadn't used a wiki until my first attempt last evening. The one I
> > used didn't enforce any specific page formats or content. One thing I
> > really appreciate about Dave's site is it's consistency, even if it is
> > a bit old school to look at. If there's a wiki way to keep things
> > consistent, improve the way it looks, and give helpers access to do
> > the dirty work for him, then I'm very much in favor of using a wiki to
> > do this.
> 
> Yes, you can do this, wiki have text codes to do things like bullets, and
> you can have macros or something similar (e. for including photos in
> wikipedia).

Most wikis have some sort of consistent look built in (header, footer,
maybe sidebar, ...).  In addition, some other wikis (like TWiki) also
support content templates which help everyone organize their content in
a similar fashion.  (In a content template (on TWiki) I typically have
some (recommended) headings often including a Contributors and Contents
heading (with the "code" (%TOC%) to automatically create a Table of
Contents).  

I've used TWiki for quite a while and have liked it.  I guess I'm
starting to grow discontented--WikiLearn is currently hosted as one
TWiki web on the twiki.org site (hosted at Sourceforge).  With somewhere
around 2000 pages (iirc), some features of TWiki work frustratingly slow
(like the More commands that allow you, among other things to rename and
"reparent" a page--they fill a drop down box with the name of all pages
in the web and it takes a while to do that for 2000 pages.)  I need to
either move to a different host where I can divide WikiLearn into
multiple (and smaller) webs, or consider something like writing my own
wiki (which is an itch I have to a certain extent).  (TWiki is one of
the few wikis that supports multiple webs (think, but don't say in front
of a twiki guru, directories or folders).  In a similar vein, twiki
calls pages: "topics".)

Nevertheless, I recommend TWiki.  There are some drawbacks.  It has a
reputation as being difficult to install, and as a Linux newbie (it can
be installed on Windows also, but when I was paying attention, that had
its share of problems as well) a few years ago, I found that to be the
case.  There have been improvements since then, but I haven't tried an
install recently.

TWiki keeps a revision history of each page, so it is fairly easy to
revert a page (but, unless I'm overlooking something added recently, it
is a copy and paste operation).  On Sourceforge one of the /tmp
directories occasionally runs out of space, and that seems to disable
the recording of page history.  

Anyway, just thought I'd throw my $.02 (or .03, .04, or whatever) in.

Randy Kramer