goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:
> Yes, unfortunately it is "hard" to rename a Swiki (can't be done AFAIK).
> But I will see what we can do - we should move all that stuff to box1
> anyway... I have thought of moving it all to minnow too, but having it
> separate has a few good points too.

Thanks Goran. (I think your mails are missing the content-type... 
iso8859-1 header ? My mailer defaults to utf-8).

Since you mention it, what are people's thoughts these days on central 
wiki versus separate wikis ? And on swiki vs. smallwiki vs. picowiki 
vs... ?

I raise this again because everything I want to do in squeak seems to 
lead to the documentation issue; which leads to the squeak wiki at 
minnow. It is full of excellent content, but always feels hard to work 
with - like rock rather than clay - because: 1. it lacks modern wiki 
conveniences, primarily natural urls and external editing, and 2. it's 
not being visibly & actively developed, and I expect getting patches 
installed there would be difficult.

Yet, developing docs elsewhere feels like fragmentation. And there's a 
lot of inertia which makes change difficult. But sooner or later we have 
to move past this status quo. I wonder how we'll do it.

Here's some random brainstorming.

Mirroring minnow. I believe someone did this. I thought of trying the 
same on joyful.com. Edits would be easier but we'd have content 
divergence. If it were really good it could be mirrored back of course.

Migrating to a newer wiki engine. It's not clear that we have one that's 
stable and scalable enough for the minnow content, yet. We could set up 
a mirror with eg SmallWiki to test this.

Transitioning to different software might also involve a server move, eg 
to Cees' machine (box1 ?). I discussed this a little with the gatech 
guys a few years back. Bandwidth usage, memory usage, advertising policy 
  and maintenance responsibility were among the issues.

Enhancing Swiki. This seems a likely option, even if SmallWiki is better 
(don't know); getting a few enhancements installed might happen sooner. 
IMHO the most useful enhancements would be:

  - natural urls, which you can easily remember and cite elsewhere, eg 
in an IRC discussion. (A more complete implementation than the one at 
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1088)

  - external editing, whether by zope-style helper script or some kind 
of wiki browser in squeak, would make larger pages far more editable.

  - ongoing updates to keep up in the spam war with less inconvenience 
to ourselves

Rapid evolution. The squeak wiki is such a central tool, I think it 
would be best for it to be continually evolving. Eg running out of a 
monticello repository where a larger group of community developers can 
commit changes at will. Then we'd see some amazing gains. With more 
powerful ways of accessing it, the value of the wiki will multiply.

I think there's a big opportunity here to increase the community's 
ability to digest and communicate squeak knowledge. Effectively 
increasing our IQ! :) Which would be kind of impactful, since we are the 
part of humanity that's trying to grok and disseminate squeak and 
smalltalk. (hand waving)

Comments welcome.
-Simon