Comment by silentbicycle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silentbicycle | Hacker News Reader

I've been lurking on the c2 wiki (and occasionally posting, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ScottVokes) for almost ten years, and the culture there feels completely different from Wikipedia. The c2 wiki isn't a blip on most programmers' radars, though, let alone the world at large.

Back when I was preparing to become a librarian (academic research or possibly a medical archivist; before I got sucked into the software engineering vortex), I spent a fair bit of time talking with my coworkers and professors about the relationship between rapidly-mutating secondary (tertiary?) sources, such as Wikipedia and blogs, and actual primary sources based on actual hardcore effing research. The c2 wiki did not once ever come into the discussion, because nobody cared about HowComeLispAndSmalltalkAintPoisonYet or DoesRelationalRequireTypes. It was too alien a culture.

I think the author is on to something, that the Wikipedia culture of anal-retentive editing and (worse yet) knee-jerk "[citation needed]" has been bleeding the spontaneity out of the popular concept of wikis, so people are much less inclined to just post stub documents and collectively flesh them out as time allows. Often, the expectation that writing ends up polished prevents it from appearing in the first place. (Documentation or otherwise.)

I've successfully pushed for a wiki literally everywhere I've worked through the last decade (including the library system, which has a great and actively maintained collection guide, based on mediawiki). Sometimes it took offering/threatening to run my own server specifically to host one, and it's always taken some content-seeding and nudging to get things in motion, but the net results have always been positive.

I've found c2 wiki very interesting, mainly for XP related stuff (eg criticism of the Visitor pattern; do the simplest thing that could possibly work) - but it's not a public wiki, because you can't contribute without a password, which only the select have (no idea how they got it.)

Reading it reminds me of a mailing list archive of intelligent discussion. Haphazard, sequential, with links only at times. There are very insightful thoughts tucked away in there, but it takes a lot of reading and tracing to find them - and then you can't find them again without going through the same process. It's abysmal, labyrinthal, like some of my prototype projects.

You can't contribute without a password? Every time I've been there, they've had the world's most half-assed captcha ("the password is [three-digit number], type it in the box"). I had no idea I was so elite.

There's a lot of great content, buried in a lot of random rambling. (And some of it is mine, sorry.) It's like HN, but without hueristic fading for old threads, and with a culture focused on software-engineering rather than startups.

This was years ago. I must have had bad luck to have wanted to edit 'special' pages, that don't supply the code. I assumed that was the general rule, which the help page seemed to confirm:

> When no code word is given, you may use an alternative code word that floats along among trusted users. There is no way to apply for this code. Try your friends-of-friends network. Remember that this code and the mechanism itself will change if abused. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MoreAboutCodes

I just checked what you said, and the above seems to be (now?) the exception, and most pages do supply the code. A surprise to me, good to know, thanks!

It was probably only enforced for pages that got a lot of vandalism, during heavy slashdotting, etc. It's definitely the exception rather than the rule.

There was times where the digit was written, other times where the digit wasn't. Only some people got the password then by word of mouth.

Ward was really willing to do something that could work for blind people as well and there wasn't really audio captcha at that time.

In my mind it didn't work really well as the community was too large, and as a wiki require a great deal of people to have it maintains such a large wiki it essentially collapsed under it's own weight and word of mouth never arrive to me (I was just a lone french with no connexions )

Not knowing whether you were going to be able to modify or not modify it at a time was also very annoying.

At the last place I worked there was some use of Sharepoint, but we were forbidden from using it for documentation after it ate a ton of our sysadmin's documentation (the only guy who was using it, that is.)

And of course this being a Windows shop the idea of using something else was too weird. "We do Windows."

We had a sharepoint-based wiki at one point. We salvaged as much content as we could and moved it to mediawiki, which actually worked* . Half our office was convinced sharepoint was deliberately designed for incompatibility with firefox. (Is there such thing as a "cygwin shop", by the way?)

* Usemod is also quite good, but less stylish.

Pretty sure it's just the normal "works only with IE" stance of most Microsoft stuff. I did some testing with Firefox and Sharepoint for work to see what doesn't work and it's fairly extensive. The worst issue stopping non-techies is that the rich text editor for textareas doesn't work in FF, you have to type in raw HTML. Pretty much a showstopper. This was SP 2007 btw, not sure if 2010 is any better. The blog and wiki features in SP2007 felt tacked on and incomplete to me anyway.

The thing that makes Sharepoint completely unusable for me is that all the links are of the javascript() variety, so quickly opening pages in tabs is functionally impossible.

It would be nice if browsers could handle middle clicks a little more gracefully in this situation.

mediawiki it also a very complex wiki, and as it somewhat became the standard, non programmer got afraid by it and didn't want to edit anything by fear of breaking something or not knowing how it work.

I had it explained to me that "MediaWiki's purpose is to power Wikipedia. Your personal wiki is a side effect."

usemod (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl) is at a sweet spot on the features vs. complexity continuum. It's also pretty easy to chroot.

I've also read on the c2 wiki. TVTropes also fits your third paragraph about no expectation of polished writing in stubs.

Yes, and it also fits the category of wikis that tend to cause insomnia. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com