Eliot Miranda wrote:
> Wikis are like gardens.  Untended they grow like weeds.  Unless one has 
> a writership with an active minority of editors, who spend time trying 
> to reorganize the wiki as it sprawls one may well end up with something 
> effectively unusable.  But as a form for organizing growing reference 
> material IMO they can't be beat; look at Wikipedia.  That is a superb 
> wiki.  The VisualWorks wiki was pretty good until its lack of spam 
> protection and lack of long-term hosting killed it dead.  Couldn't we 
> have a community project to reorganize the wiki?  Its the right form, 
> its just a little overgrown right now.

A wiki can be great for reference material, but it's terrible for 
something that has a limited lifetime. My post about the current state 
of profiling makes sense today, but it won't make sense even weeks from 
now because what we were talking about was in the context of changing 
things. So you need to be able to look at a date and say "oh, that was 
five years ago, nevermind" or "oh, this is how they ended up doing it 
that way". Much of the information in particular on the Swiki is dated 
material that needs to be seen within a particular time frame. And that 
is after all, what news and blogs are for.

As for out-reach, I have never looked at either the VisualWorks wiki or 
the VisualWorks news groups / mailing lists. Practically all my 
(limited) information about VisualWorks is straight from here:

   http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/

And I don't think I'm the only one. As a matter of fact, I think that 
the Weekly Squeak has probably more outreach than any other part of the 
community. Except that it's a bit of a high-profile operation (which is 
great since it makes it attractive) and what I am looking for is a place 
where we can put a bit more technical discussions and insights.

Look at it that way: Once we had a discussion on Squeak-dev and come to 
a conclusion, I'm looking for a place where can put that conclusion so 
that other people know that we've had the discussion and what its 
conclusion was. And I don't think the Swiki is the place for it.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

PS. Did I mention the Swiki is ugly? I mean, come on ... this is the 
21st century.