[wiki]: Bringing FIRSTwiki back

[Bkeeneykid]

Originally Posted by virtuald

It appears that both of those wikia wikis have less than 10 articles (and they're mostly stubs), so they're not good places to start. It's possible that wikia (in general) could be a good fit. Its also possible that one of the hosted MediaWiki providers could be a good fit. I haven't looked at any of those.

Thanks for the offer of web hosting -- but it does not solve the biggest issues that I identified: I don't want to maintain a MediaWiki installation at all nor do I think others would want to either (issues of time + commitment), nor do I want to deal with spam (captchas aren't perfect, and even CD authentication integration wouldn't solve everything), and I really like the idea of community members being able to download full git repos of the wiki (though, I know mediawiki has export capability too) so that if it goes under again then the content can still exist.

Bkeeneykid, I agree that the current situation with the github pages wiki is fairly terrible, and that a browser based solution (like MediaWiki) for editing the wiki would be ideal.

I just changed the edit button so it goes directly to the edit page on github -- their workflow forks for you automatically, allows editing in the browser, and then prompts you to make a pull request. Try it out.

Unfortunately, there isn't a good mechanism for creating new pages... and github pages is not good at images either.

It is certainly a chicken + egg problem. Hopefully I'll find some time this summer to fix the editing problems -- there seems to be a lot of activity in the space of creating CMS layered on top of github, and it shouldn't be too hard to co-opt some of these technologies that are coming out.

Perhaps the reason I'm not as interested in hosted wiki solutions is that my inner techie really likes the idea of a fully tweakable wiki site, that *anyone* can make a suggestion/edit of any content on the site, including style, layout, structure, etc without restrictions. While this is true of normal wiki platforms to some extent, it's not quite the same and not as instantaneous.

While I think that I could take on the responsibility of maintaining it, I probably can't, but if a group of people were responsible rather than one person, it would probably solve that problem. Correct me if I'm wrong, @kmehta, but I believe that MediaWiki by default has Git integration, offering the same level of protection you have on your current system. Export capability is fairly easy as well, but I'm not sure how many users actually want this feature.

I'm sure that the inner hacker in all of us would LOVE a hackable wiki, but the fact of the matter is we have to take a look at scale here. Why create a entire solution for a problem that has already been solved, with out needs dozens times over? MediaWiki is fully hackable if you really wish, and I'm not sure how it's less instantaneous. Even the older FIRSTWiki was hosted through MediaWiki, and I don't believe anyone complained about that. Much of the world's wikis are, and I don't see why it can't be an option for us.

On another note, I think I may have a less team-oriented hosting place available soon that's related to something in my signature.