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A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

c2.com

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Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#91

Post by twic »

mbrock wrote: post #83
rayiner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at a movie from the 1990s, where a character pulls up say a news article on the internet. Just text and some pictures. So usable! The web peaked in 1998, when everything was plain HTML but you could Google-search it, and everything since then has been the moral progeny of the tag. So when a perfectly usable site like C2 embraces the bankruptcy of the Web 2.0 era, I think people are justified in expressing…

The web peaked in 1998? That's an interesting claim to make on a forum that frequently discusses new web technology, the progress in browser engines, the interesting new stuff that's being made. In 1998 there was no Gmail, no Github, no Slack, no Discourse, and so on and so on. C2 may have been perfectly usable, and I think it should remain as an archive, but there was barely any contribution anymore. When you imply…

We didn't need half those things, because we had email, usenet, and IRC. Those were actually pretty good. I certainly had far better discussions on usenet back then than i've ever had on the web since.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#92

Post by shoover »

mbrock wrote: post #20

The original wiki was a wonderful community, alive in that ineffable way that very few online communities are, totally free and public. I wrote a blog post [0] about how strongly it influenced me as a person and the gratitude I feel for it. Ward Cunningham is a respected and intelligent software designer who works on open projects for the public good. The immediate cynicism and dismissal I've seen of his new project…

Right on.

I recently deployed a fedwiki farm for my team after playing with it myself and catching just a whiff of the possibilities. I had a litany of complaints myself, but was compelled to press on due to the intriguing promise of the goals of the project.

While some issues stem from the fundamental design of tracking individual paragraphs, I believe many of the problems will be designed away with better client side programming or alternative UIs in time. With this rollout of fedwiki on the original wiki, I now think all the issues will be defended or fixed sooner than I thought.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#93

Post by aw3c2 »

agumonkey wrote: post #18
aw3c2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501

Oh, thanks a lot, didn't know archive.org had a system in place to download archived mirrors. 40 well used Megabytes.

It's not by me and not from the wayback machine (might be integrated though), just hosted there. A crawl was requested in the archiveteam IRC channel a while ago and someone did it.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#94

Post by shoover »

mbrock wrote: post #78
NolMan wrote: post #74

The page claims that the new wiki is written with a distributed database but from what I can tell it just writes pages to the file system? https://github.com/fedwiki/wiki-node-server/blob/master/lib/... Am I missing something?

He doesn't mean that each server uses a distributed database to store its documents. The wiki is federated, much like Usenet is through the network of NNTP servers. For more info, see Cunningham's documents "On Federating Wiki" [0] and "Federation Details" [1]. This is distributed in the sense that Git is a distributed source control system. [0]: https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki/wi... [1]: ht…

That said, there are also options to use databases for page storage on the back end: https://github.com/fedwiki/wiki-node.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#95

Post by mbrock »

rayiner wrote: post #90
mbrock wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web peaked in 1998? That's an interesting claim to make on a forum that frequently discusses new web technology, the progress in browser engines, the interesting new stuff that's being made. In 1998 there was no Gmail, no Github, no Slack, no Discourse, and so on and so on. C2 may have been perfectly usable, and I think it should remain as an archive, but there was barely any contribution anymore. When you imply…

> That's an interesting claim to make on a forum that frequently discusses new web technology I don't like to shy away from controversy. ;) > In 1998 there was no Gmail, no Github, no Slack, no Discourse, and so on and so on. No, but there was SMTP/IMAP/Exchange, which was better and didn't spy on you. There was ViewCVS, which was just peachy, and in any case the improvements in Github over CVS have to do with git ve…

I think we agree on a lot of things.

I also think Ward's project is not fundamentally bad just because it uses JavaScript.

I think the idea of federated text sharing through free software and open protocols is lovely and that anyone making a serious attempt at this should be encouraged.

And I think that interactive web software can actually help, especially when it comes to inviting people who wouldn't enjoy setting up a Usenet client.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#96

Post by shoover »

SwellJoe wrote: post #4

I believe the wiki is among the most amazing things to come out of the web (and think Cunningham is a genius for inventing it, or discovering it, or whatever process made it happen), and I can't count the number of times I've lost an hour or two spelunking into the C2 wiki. But, I'm having a hard time making sense of this UI. The panels popping up seemingly infinitely into the right side of the screen (every click ma…

These are all UI complaints and all fixable by anyone with a better idea and JS chops whether Ward likes the particular changes or not.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#97

Post by jcoder »

andolanra wrote: post #77
jcoder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the bar for contributing to the wiki has been raised from "has access to a computer" to "has access, knowledge, and resources to run a wiki server"? I hope one or more WaaS (wiki as a service) providers will emerge where a user account == a fed wiki node.

That's already how it works. You could run your own node and share information back and forth with other nodes, or you could use an account on an existing node. This is clearly the case: if you go to the C2 Federated Wiki, you'll note the Login button.

Ah, thank you. Still wrapping my head around the new architecture.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#98

Post by mbrock »

shoover wrote: post #92
mbrock wrote: post #20

The original wiki was a wonderful community, alive in that ineffable way that very few online communities are, totally free and public. I wrote a blog post [0] about how strongly it influenced me as a person and the gratitude I feel for it. Ward Cunningham is a respected and intelligent software designer who works on open projects for the public good. The immediate cynicism and dismissal I've seen of his new project…

Right on. I recently deployed a fedwiki farm for my team after playing with it myself and catching just a whiff of the possibilities. I had a litany of complaints myself, but was compelled to press on due to the intriguing promise of the goals of the project. While some issues stem from the fundamental design of tracking individual paragraphs, I believe many of the problems will be designed away with better client si…

Good to hear that someone else is interested!

Could you explain a bit more about the issues with tracking paragraphs? It sounds like an interesting idea.

From perusing the GitHub documents briefly, it seems like the architecture is such that other UIs should be possible. Do you have a hunch about the possibility of making, say, an Emacs client?

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#100

Post by peterwwillis »

What's important about this isn't the server or client, but the protocol.

Like all peer to peer networks, all you need is a clear documenting of the protocol and anyone can create their own servers or clients. This way people concerned with SEO can expose the wiki's contents easier, and users can design a more attractive user interface, all while addressing the same content and sharing it the same way.

If this works as a protocol, it should allow anyone to collaborate on documents that synchronize independent of a central source. This is really useful for people who need to be able to share some information in a multitude of ways and on different networks, online or offline. The only downside is it seems the addressable content has a limited scope. And of course, there's probably (i'm guessing?) not much in the way of access controls to prevent people from getting or modifying information they shouldn't have.

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