Re: Wiki seems to be near to collapse!

On Mittwoch, 8. April 2009, Michael Schneider wrote:
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: public-owl-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-owl-wg-request@w3.org]
> >On Behalf Of Markus Krötzsch
> >Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 12:02 AM
> >To: Bijan Parsia
> >Cc: Boris Motik; 'Sandro Hawke'; 'Ian Horrocks'; 'W3C OWL Working
> >Group'; 'W3C OWL Chairs'
> >Subject: Re: Wiki seems to be near to collapse!
> >
> ><snip>
> >
> >> > Given how much of a
> >> > pain the Wiki solution was, I would be happy to give that up in
> >> > exchange for a
> >> > much more comfortable system.
>
> [...]
>
> >Regarding performance: I did not encounter such extreme performance
> >issues
> >with the (technically similar) wikis I run. The wiki engine used here is
> >known
> >to scale extremely well to large databases and user groups. So I guess
> >today's
> >outage was a specific problem that could happen to SVN just as well.
>
> I had the same problems (continuous access failures and long delays)
> today when accessing the mailing list. And I had such phases in the
> past pretty often. I don't think that it really has to do with the
> Wiki.
>
> I must say I like the Wiki approach. 

So do I, regarding workflow and general access (no extra tools, easy access 
from any machine with a web browser, text-based document search, complete 
history, etc.). But the content type "W3C specification document" is not 
supported well in wikis. For shorter information pieces and notes, a wiki is 
clearly the best solution.

Also, we have had some typical technology transition problems here: people 
complain about the HTML features that wikis are missing, but they do hardly 
exploit the wiki features that HTML does not have (including templates, which 
could really be used like LaTeX macros everywhere, instead of repeatedly 
typing things like <em title="MUST in RFC 2119 context" 
class="RFC2119">MUST</em> and <span class="name">x<sub>j</sub></span>).

-- Markus

> For example, one can easily point
> people to a particular historic version of a document. They don't have
> to download anything, the old version is simply available as a website.
> One can also easily play around with new stylesheets and the like
> in a sandbox version of the document, create examples, and everything
> is a website accessible from everywhere. I wouldn't talk against
> an SVN/LaTeX solution, but I'm happy with the Wiki.
>
> Michael
>
> --
> Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
> Research Scientist, Dept. Information Process Engineering (IPE)
> Tel  : +49-721-9654-726
> Fax  : +49-721-9654-727
> Email: michael.schneider@fzi.de
> WWW  : http://www.fzi.de/michael.schneider
> =======================================================================
> FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe
> Haid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14, D-76131 Karlsruhe
> Tel.: +49-721-9654-0, Fax: +49-721-9654-959
> Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts, Az 14-0563.1, RP Karlsruhe
> Vorstand: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rüdiger Dillmann, Dipl. Wi.-Ing. Michael Flor,
> Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolffried Stucky, Prof. Dr. Rudi Studer
> Vorsitzender des Kuratoriums: Ministerialdirigent Günther Leßnerkraus
> =======================================================================


-- 
Markus Krötzsch
Institut AIFB, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe
phone +49 (0)721 608 7362          fax +49 (0)721 608 5998
mak@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de          www  http://korrekt.org