From: Matthew L. <mat...@gm...> - 2009-02-10 00:36:38
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Fred, On Feb 9, 2009, at 4:39 PM, Wheeler, Frederick W (GE, Research) wrote: > A wiki seems to be a natural platform for an encyclopedia or a faq - > where there are many short self-contained and interrelated sections, > no section is more important than another, and there are no strong > dependencies. A book is bit different. It has a clear linear order > with later material building on earlier material, with some exceptions > of course. If we put the VXL Book in a wiki without any precaution it > might become disorganized over time, and less like a book. You have a good point, but I'm not sure if the VXL Book is the best example of clear linear order. There is certainly some degree of linearity. Chapters 1-3 should come first in the current order. Chapters 4-9 should be next, but could go in any order; then Chapters 10-12 in any order; then appendices in any order. Basically, it's just like library dependencies. For example, core 1 libraries are independent and so the order you read about them should be independent. That said, I have nothing against keeping an organized book structure. I like all of your suggestions below. > Perhaps this is a solution: We could have a VXL wiki, used for > anything related to VXL: the book itself, FAQs, meeting notes, > proposals, > etc. For the book we could have special extra rules, like this: > > 1) The VXL_Book page has a link to every other page that is part of > the VXL Book. It is bascially the Table of Contents. > > 2) All pages that are part of the VXL Book will have the same prefix > in their name, perhaps like VXL_Book_vil, VXL_Book_vnl, > VXL_Book_Build_Systems. > > 3) VXL_Book_* pages may not link to other pages. Or perhaps if they > do, it must be like an external reference, or a footnote. > > The idea is that you can go to page VXL_Book, and read each > subsection, and it is like a book. We could occasionaly verify that > any VXL_Book_* page is linked directly from the VXL_Book page. Anyone > editing a VXL_Book_* page will understand that they are editing part > of a book, and they should keep that in mind. > > I've seen wikis go bad due to neglect and multiple authors with > conflicting organizational plans. I don't want the VXL Book to be a > victim. I would argue that the current texinfo book has gone bad due to neglect. Much of the material is out of date, and the online book itself hasn't been rebuilt in over a year. > If we use a wiki, would it be a good idea to occasionally dump the > sourcecode for each page and check it into the cvs tree? That might > facilitate building a PDF version of the book with some other tool > that understands wiki markup. Is there a way to dump like that? Yes, you can easily dump the wiki markup with the sourceforge wiki. I imagine most other wiki platform would support that too. It shouldn't be too difficult to put together a script that generates PDF (but I'm not volunteering to do that). One option is http://deplate.sourceforge.net/ , but there might be better options. > > Otherwise, is > it OK for a wiki database to be the master copy, and sole history > mechanism > for the VXL Book and VXL FAQ? I like the idea of using mediawiki > like a > Collaborative editing tool and viewer, with text-only wiki-markup dump > getting > archived, say once a month. That sounds like a good idea to me. |