I doubt many people care enough to comment. My comments below: --- James. > -----Original Message----- > From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu > [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu] On Behalf Of Bradley Ferguson > Sent: 2005 Feb 21, Mon 08:27 > To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public. > Subject: Re: [OT] Recommendations sought for FTP & POP3 servers > Importance: Low > > On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 16:40:14 -0800, James Newtons Massmind > wrote: > > AFAIK wikimedia doesn't address ownership. The "homemade" system at > > piclist.com allows private content as well as preventing > newbie's from > > fing up content that is owned by a page editor. This is the main > > reason why I built the system. > > AFAIK, you're right about ownership. As to private content, > if you are referring to the collections of your personal > information (e.g., solar heating), you could run a seperate > wikimedia engine (which is really just php scripts) for that. No, I meant that it is possible to post content to the site which is ONLY available to the member who posted it. E.g. there are a number of trade secrets in the site that are not publicly viewable. On a single page, for a single subject, there can be paragraphs that are removed before the page is displayed. It allows me (and I hope others) to document everything in one place while still keeping parts of that documentation out of the public eye. > As to newbies, it requires no hacking of the scripts to > prevent anonymous edits and turn off account creation. If > somebody makes a mistake, revert their edit. If somebody > becomes abusive, remove their account. I like the current systems ability to allow anonymous page _appends_ while allowing only page editors to modify and organize the content of the page. Sadly, the volunteer rate for page editors has been abysmal. David Cary has done a lot of work. E.g. http://www.piclist.com/techref/app/protel.htm Surducan Vasile edits a page or two. http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist/pcbcontest.htm Sergio Masci keeps the assembly language page in order. http://www.piclist.com/techref/microchip/language/asms.htm I may have forgotten some, sorry if I missed you. > Theoretically, you could hack the Wikimedia scripts to add in > additional features, but perhaps you don't have the time for > that these days (as compared to when you did the initial work > on your current system). Having invested this much time, I'm loath to toss it. I'd rather spend the time cleaning up and improving. > > The other reason is that the actual site is just raw, pure > HTML that I > > can browse directly here with AOLpress (a browser that is > actually a > > wysiwyg editor at the same time) and can be transferred to > CD (after a > > script extracts the private parts) for transfer to others. > > The wikis are not raw HTML, so you wouldn't be able to edit > them, but the internal Wikimedia editor, although not > wysiwig, allows fairly easy content creation and editing. > You wouldn't be able to easily burn the wiki to a CD > directly, but you could just run a site ripper, which would > allow the PHP scripts to convert the internal database data > to HTML. You might have to run a find/replace on the result > to remove references to "special" pages, which the wiki would > normally dynamically create. Your private (personal?) > information would reside under a different subdirectory and > so would not be picked up by the ripper. With 3 Gigabytes of content, rippers are the bane of my existence. It takes a long time just for the script that removes private content, and that has direct access to the file system rather than employing the web server. > > Any suggestions on making the "homemade" parts seem more > professional > > would be very appreciated. > > Don't get me wrong, I think you've done a great job. Thank you. > What I > refer to is only little things like javascript, Most of the functions will work without javascript, the scripting is there to "enhance the experience" if you will. Is there a better way to do it? > the use of > font size=+2, Where did I do that? I try to use heading tags, not FONT tags. Or did you mean the use of H1 at the start of each page? Other suggestions? > and the cluttered appearance of many of the > pages. The clutter may simply be the nature of the > beast--where it is a collection of thoughts from a multitude > of people instead of an organized article. I mention > Wikipedia because, there, a collection of thoughts there can > be reformed into an organized article, but perhaps that > wouldn't even be the correct thing to do as you would lose > ownership of the information fairly quickly unless editors > were very careful to maintain footnotes. Some of the ownership information is important, but page editors can reformat that easily. E.g. "Jack shit says: [blockquote] what he says" can easily be changed to "what he says [sup][a title='Jack Shit']1[/a][/sup]" when they bring the separate quotes together. The real problem here is the lack of page editors. And my unwillingness to allow anonymous page editors. Do you think it would help if I allowed people to add comments anywhere in the page rather than just at the end? > There seem to be so many committed members to the list; it > would be interesting to see what kind of definitive PIC > resource they could develop if given the encyclopedic nature > of a wiki. Again, I fail to see what the current site does not provide that a wiki does provide. I think of the site as a wiki, but one with a different user interface to allow more protection. In fact, I think the user interface is much easier for new users or those who are not familiar with wikis. The little form at the end is so simple to use, compared with all the codes, etc.. For formatting wiki content. > I hope this doesn't explode on the mailing list, though, it > was just a brief comment. I'm grateful for the attention. I hope it provides some critical feedback that will allow me to get the sort of involvement that some of the existing wikis have commanded. > Bradley > -- > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change > your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist