Re: moving to a git-backed wiki

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 8:16 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 10:34:38PM +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>
>> > Forget about a git-backed wiki for a moment, and imagine a regular old
>> > Mediawiki. What are the operations you can perform? You can look at
>> > the current or any past version of a page, you can do diffs between
>> > versions of pages, and you can create a new version of a page. All
>> > through some CGI forms.
>>
>> Howe about these?
>
> I've never really used a wiki in any in-depth way, so be gentle if my
> utter cluelessness about these features shows through.
>
>> 1) Support for discussion; since changes can be controversial.
>
> Doesn't this just happen on special Talk: pages? Couldn't these just be
> pages with special names?

Could be.

>> 2) Support for article move; so everything is kept organized.
>
> Isn't that even simpler in a git-backed wiki? You just move the files.
> Obviously you would want to update links, too, and presumably the wiki
> software helps with that. But that is outside the scope of data storage.
> In a git-backed wiki, you would get one atomic commit with the move and
> link updating.

Yeah.

>> 3) Support for "who is linking here". Also helps reorganization.
>
> Again, is that a fundamental storage issue? It seems like you could
> implement that easily on top of basic storage with a grep (and some
> caching if you are going to let people do it a lot via the web).

I doubt that. That's where you need an SQL database, to make it fast.

>> 4) Support for categories. Ditto.
>
> I have no idea how categories work. Special page naming and/or
> directories?

Each page has a tag [[Category::Tips]], and then the the
Category::Tips page gets a new link automatically. Again, SQL helps.

>> 5) Support for watchlist, e-mail notifications. So that you are
>> up-to-date with the changes.
>
> Post-receive hook?

Yeah, but you need to store the watchers, and their preferences. Again, SQL.

>> 6) Support for contribution backtracking. So that it's easy to know who's who.
>
> git log? git blame? :)

Sure, 'git log' would do it... Very inefficiently.

>> 7) Personal wiki pages (with discussion). So you can put information
>> about yourself, and general notes.
>
> Specially named pages for people?

Right.

> Obviously I'm just filling in these features off the top of my head.
> MediaWiki is a mature system, and I doubt that either ikiwiki or gollum
> has nearly the same featureset. But that was never my point. In the bit
> you quoted, my point was that a git-interface to a wiki was useful and
> feasible. And I stand by that.

It might be possible to implement some functionality of a full blown
wiki such as MediaWiki on a git backed wiki, but my point is that it's
not there _now_, and more likely would never be.

> Even with just the basic functionality of fetch/diff/push, that still
> makes it a useful interface into an existing wiki for a large number of
> users who just want to do simple stuff (or power users who happen to be
> doing simple stuff at the moment).
>
> I also happen to think you could put all of those features into a
> git-backed wiki, and build the web features on _top_ of git access. But
> I'm not volunteering to work on that.

Exactly, and nobody is volunteering for that. MediaWiki is the best,
it has all the features, and it's already there.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras