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Wiki ... what and how ...

Tom 4's picture
Posted on 2005-08-22 13:40 By Tom 4 (Maple Rating 4 468)

The topic of Wiki has popped up in several postings including in response to my question In the "How do we grow this site?". I think we're generally agreed that this would be a good thing to do. My real question is what and how are we going to do this.

As for the "What?" I thought of some immediate topics to initiate that almost seem like "no-brainers". Many of them are compilation lists including,


  • Top Maple "gems" - poorly documented but very powerful tips and techniques
  • Best math/Maple resourses on the Web (compilation of links). Several have already posted links to great sites that I was unaware of.
  • You get the picture

This type of stuff is easy to do and with a stretch of the imagination, constitute wiki activities.

Knowing full well that the Wiki concept is both richer and generally more ambitious than the above samples, I'd like to get your thoughts on the matter.

Topic suggestions as well as some sense of how we might implement them here (now that you have some sense of the mechanics of this site), would be great ...

Cheers

T4.

Comments

On Wiki stuff

Comment on 2005-08-22 17:10 from Stephen Forrest (Maple Rating 2 96)

If we're going to move towards a wiki, I think that incrementally adding wiki-like features here would be a lot more work (and be a lot more bug-ridden) than simply taking existing free wiki software and adapting it to our purposes, to be used alongside the blogging/messageboard software.

The most frequently used wiki software out there is MediaWiki, which would probably not be too difficult to rebrand with the MaplePrimes look-and-feel; see Wikipedia for an example of MediaWiki in use.

What would go in a MaplePrimes wiki? The basic idea of a wiki is centred around the idea of a web page that can be edited by anyone. A simple idea, but it has implications that require a bit of thought.

One issue is that wiki pages should not be owned by any one user. For example, one could have "Steve's Top 10 Maple Tips", but since the page name implies that only one person could edit it, this is rather contrary to the wiki spirit and might as well be a static webpage.

A slightly subtler issue is that, even if they're not formally owned by anyone, pages should not exhibit the personalities of their creators excessively: the idea is to work collaboratively towards a useful result, and avoid a tug-of-war over the page in question. Wikipedia solves this with their Neutral Point of View policy. MaplePrimes could have a similar policy focused towards being constructive in discussions about Maple.

Some ideas for what could evolve on a MaplePrimes wiki:

  • "recipes" of code for specific tasks
  • unofficial, community-provided "help pages" for Maple functions or other components of Maple
  • pages about using Maple written by and targeted towards members of specific communities (e.g. engineers, computational biologists, high-performance computing types, etc.)
  • code fragments for people new to the language
  • a good explanation of Maple's nondeterministic behaviour

I'm fairly familiar with the MediaWiki system from my edits on Wikipedia, so feel free to ask me any questions you might have about that.

Will's picture

Good points

Comment on 2005-08-22 19:23 from Will (Maple Rating 4 824)

Steve, you covered most of the important points about Wiki's.

One thing I can point out is that there are existing modules for Drupal that create Wikis so I would not need to use a seperate system for the Wiki component of MaplePrimes.

____
William Spaetzel
Applications Developer, Maplesoft

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