Argh. There are too many Perl Wikis. Only a few (perhaps
a dozen) are large enough that their maintainers could
take a vacation and have the community keep the Wiki
propped up. Most of them are just the result of endless
fragmentation, and there isn't enough attention going
around to read them.
Phoenix.PM.org's
TinyWiki has a small selection of Perl related Wikis.
Feel free to add others.
Perl Design Patterns itself has a list of resources
which is quite large. Some of the links are Wikis.
I've seen this
happen with MUD, too. When I started 'netting back in
1990, there were about 30 LPMuds (multi user dungeons).
It was hard to get on the 'net at all, and when you did,
it was probably on a vt220 dumb terminal attached to a VAX.
It was almost impossible to get permission to run one
from shell on a machine. There was very little recreation
on the 'net aside from net news at this time. The
many people who played all played the few games out
there. They hated the MUD management, they were all
convinced they could do a better job, they had big
plans and no clue how to implement them but absolute
confidence they could figure it out.
When commercial Internet access became available and
you could purchase a shell account from a place like
Eskimo North (eskimo.com), suddenly, the number of MUDs
exploded. All of these people that wanted to start a
MUD were suddenly able to. The result was more MUDs
than players! Every player had their own MUD, or even
two! No longer were people having a good time on a crowded
server dispising the management, they were spinning their
wheels reinventing wheels that no one would ever see.
MUD fragmented and died. Ever Quest came and mopped
the floor with MUD. Heck, ICQ mopped the floor with
MUD. People want to see all of their friends in
one virtual place.
If there were a great demand for Perl Wikis, then people
besides myself would actually
do things on
perldesignpatterns.com,
but they don't. I've hit 10,000 hits on the table of
contents page, but about a dozen pages have been touched
by hands other than mine. Which leads me to my second
point in this rant: doing anything like this is an
incomprehensiably huge amount of work. All of those
people who desperetely wanted to start a MUD? They
duplicated effort with each other, which would have
required thousands of tens of thousands of hours,
which they weren't really willing to put in. They just
thought they were.
If you haven't reached this conclusion on your own, I'll hand it to you: if you have a hankering to do something
Perl-Wiki related, work on metawiki technology.
Sunir created a
meta-Wiki search that searches numerous Wikis.
Ward's Wiki, the original, is playing with sister sites. TinyWiki
(Perl Design Patterns) is playing with automated
sister-sites, where links are automatically returned.
This is the tip of the iceburg. A huge amount of work
needs to be done.
InterWiki
is gaining momentum, but the interlists are manually
maintained. De ja vu, LPMud had "intermud" lists that
were automatically maintained, that lessons should
be learned from. This should be generated automatically,
from crawling. Rather than replicate content or link
offsite, RSS feeds hold a lot of promise, and
OddMuse is playing with
this - a page from another Wiki could be included
automatically, in cases where there is overlap in
subject matter (frequent). Decentralizing navigation
is a much harder topic.
If for some reason you find this interesting,
I wrote a piece a while back on PDP's
Wiki and
what makes a good forum in response to another thread
about improving the EverythingEngine. My conclusion
was going all-out on Wiki isn't the correct solution,
but rather, a solid commitment to ongoing editing and
refactoring and summerizing of the site.
I don't read here, so if you really want to discuss
this with me in particular, email me. scott@slowass.net.
-scott