[squeak-dev] Squeakapedia?

Chris Muller asqueaker at gmail.com
Tue Jun 15 20:06:40 UTC 2010


I, too, an fascinated by this question:  _Why_ has the wiki "fallen
out of favor?"

I am skeptical that it is because there are multiple versions of
Squeak and the inherent out-of-dateness that creates.  This is
something that all forms of documentation face, even internal ones
that are versioned with the code.  Just look at how often code
comments are found to be out of of date.

The value of documentation is all about what we *decide* to put into it.

So why, oh why, have we "decided" to not update the wiki?

IMO, we, as a community, are stuck in this feedback loop; where
something that isn't "new and sexy", does not deserve our time or
attention.  The lack of attention causes bit-rot, further
deteriorating the image of the "old thing".

But the irony is, one of the "new sexy things" (depending on one's
perceptions, of course) is just an electronic version of something
much older than the wiki.  The Pharo community are making on-line
"books", much more old-fashioned than a wiki.  The Squeak wiki, to me,
seems much more dynamic, hyper-linked, and "finer-grained".  It also
*designed*, originally, for this medium known as The World Wide
Web....   :)

This is not a criticism of Pharo or the electronic-book format; I like
books and their more linear nature bodes well for tutorials.  I just
think another great resource, the wiki, sits right under right our
nose, and the only real "deficiency" it suffers as a tool for
documentation is that it doesn't have sexy colors or buttons, thus
leading to provoking our psychotic feedback loop..

 - Chris



On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 5:13 AM, Ralph Johnson <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> I've used lots of wikis over the years, starting with the original
> c2.com wiki.    While each had its unique features that made it
> interesting, basically they were all good.  Wikis are cool and, when
> there is a community behind them, can be very powerful.
>
> The squeak wiki has fallen out of favor.  It used to be extremely
> useful and was used a lot, it isn't used as much now.  I don't think
> that its problems have much to do with the platform it is running on.
> While Mediawiki is certainly a very nice wiki, I think the problems of
> the Squeak wiki would be unchanged if it were a Mediawiki.
>
> So, what is wrong with the Squeak wiki?  Why isn't it used as much?
>
> In my opinion, the problem is that, from a documentation point of
> view, there is no such thing as Squeak, rather, there are many
> versions of Squeak.  Although there are some things they all have in
> common, they differ in some ways.  If you make a separate wiki for
> each version, you fragment your community and have no way of dealing
> with duplicate pages.  If you make a single wiki for them all, like
> the Squeak wiki did, you end up with lots of information that is still
> true for older versions but is no longer true for the latest.  And
> since a lot of people are still running the older versions, you don't
> want to get rid of that information.
>
> The new way for making documentation, which is to treat it as source
> and to version it like source, solves these problems.  It probably
> introduces some problems of its own, but I think it is probably the
> best alternative for creating good, long-lasting documentation for
> Squeak.
>
> -Ralph
>
>



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