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| Perl Monk, Perl Meditation | |
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Argh. There are too many Perl Wikis. Only a few (perhaps
a dozen) are large enough that their maintainers could
take a vacation and have the community keep the Wiki
propped up. Most of them are just the result of endless
fragmentation, and there isn't enough attention going
around to read them.
Phoenix.PM.org's TinyWiki has a small selection of Perl related Wikis. Feel free to add others. Perl Design Patterns itself has a list of resources which is quite large. Some of the links are Wikis. I've seen this happen with MUD, too. When I started 'netting back in 1990, there were about 30 LPMuds (multi user dungeons). It was hard to get on the 'net at all, and when you did, it was probably on a vt220 dumb terminal attached to a VAX. It was almost impossible to get permission to run one from shell on a machine. There was very little recreation on the 'net aside from net news at this time. The many people who played all played the few games out there. They hated the MUD management, they were all convinced they could do a better job, they had big plans and no clue how to implement them but absolute confidence they could figure it out. When commercial Internet access became available and you could purchase a shell account from a place like Eskimo North (eskimo.com), suddenly, the number of MUDs exploded. All of these people that wanted to start a MUD were suddenly able to. The result was more MUDs than players! Every player had their own MUD, or even two! No longer were people having a good time on a crowded server dispising the management, they were spinning their wheels reinventing wheels that no one would ever see. MUD fragmented and died. Ever Quest came and mopped the floor with MUD. Heck, ICQ mopped the floor with MUD. People want to see all of their friends in one virtual place. If there were a great demand for Perl Wikis, then people besides myself would actually do things on perldesignpatterns.com, but they don't. I've hit 10,000 hits on the table of contents page, but about a dozen pages have been touched by hands other than mine. Which leads me to my second point in this rant: doing anything like this is an incomprehensiably huge amount of work. All of those people who desperetely wanted to start a MUD? They duplicated effort with each other, which would have required thousands of tens of thousands of hours, which they weren't really willing to put in. They just thought they were. If you haven't reached this conclusion on your own, I'll hand it to you: if you have a hankering to do something Perl-Wiki related, work on metawiki technology. Sunir created a meta-Wiki search that searches numerous Wikis. Ward's Wiki, the original, is playing with sister sites. TinyWiki (Perl Design Patterns) is playing with automated sister-sites, where links are automatically returned. This is the tip of the iceburg. A huge amount of work needs to be done. InterWiki is gaining momentum, but the interlists are manually maintained. De ja vu, LPMud had "intermud" lists that were automatically maintained, that lessons should be learned from. This should be generated automatically, from crawling. Rather than replicate content or link offsite, RSS feeds hold a lot of promise, and OddMuse is playing with this - a page from another Wiki could be included automatically, in cases where there is overlap in subject matter (frequent). Decentralizing navigation is a much harder topic. If for some reason you find this interesting, I wrote a piece a while back on PDP's Wiki and what makes a good forum in response to another thread about improving the EverythingEngine. My conclusion was going all-out on Wiki isn't the correct solution, but rather, a solid commitment to ongoing editing and refactoring and summerizing of the site. I don't read here, so if you really want to discuss this with me in particular, email me. scott@slowass.net. -scott In reply to Was, a Wiki for Perl
by scrottie
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