(Authors will not be forced to use the wiki for their documents, either for gathering comments or for writing.)

He's written a HOWTO: http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/WikiText-HOWTO/. (I guess he's calling it WikiText. Once I viewed a sample document on the wiki but I haven't found that link. Maybe it's in the HOWTO.)

Quotes from Posts to ldp-discuss

Status around 20020117

The following is cut and pasted from an update David sent to the ldp-discuss list <discuss@linuxdoc.org>. (When I find the archive I'll post a link to these instead of quoting.)

The Wiki is up and functional. There is no integration yet, no way for Ferg to publish with it. But, it will generate DocBook for you and give you an HTML "preview" even. It tracks version changes. No facility yet for reverting changes, that will come though.

While I'm working on that additional functionality, would anyone care to try using it and see how they like it? Particularly good would be anyone who is having trouble with DocBook, or who hasn't changed from some other format into DocBook because of DocBook fears, real or imagined.

I've completely rewritten the way the database handles security. Now, anyone with an account can add notes to maintainers and documents, but only an admin (which is only me right now) and the author can change document information. Before, any registered user could do anything.

Your account is not yet "tied" to your document, though. If you are an author and wish to maintain your own meta-data in the database, or use the Wiki functionality, you'll need to email me your username and a document title or something so I can give you the appropriate access.

Anyone is also welcome to try banging on it to see if they can cause damage they aren't supposed to. Please do be non-destructive, though, okay? I just did a database backup, but still...

WikiLearn Competition

Here's another email (from David) that gives you an idea of some of his plans. (Looks like WikiLearn is going to have some stiff competition (or just fade away).)

I want to start mirroring some relevant Wikipedia articles on the LDP. While the LDP has a pretty good (and growing!) collection of HOWTOs and Guides about the technical issues, we have very little content about the larger concepts. These articles would help fill in the gaps. And as a nice bonus, they are already all well maintained and getting better every day. We have Wikipedia's blessing to use them.

I currently allow one to link to the Wikipedia from within a WikiText document by using a link like wiki:Unix.

In the output document you get a nice link to an article that will help someone very new to Linux to understand what's being talked about. That's a good thing.

Unfortunately, those links will be broken when the user is reading local documentation without a network connection. So, I want to include them in their own "Wikipedia" section within the LDP. I'd probably put them under /wikipedia/ in the collection. Then the wiki:foo link would go to the local copy.

I want to generate the pages from the Wiki source, not just download the Wikipedia html, so we can "brand" it like the rest of the LDP site, as long as we give good and proper and fair attribution to the Wikipedia. And I also am going to leave in a link to the Wikipedia site, where a reader can edit the article if they wish.

This seems like a good thing for both us and the Wikipedia. It took me all of two hours to write some scripts that download the Wikipedia tarball, search our WikiText for links to wiki articles, and convert those documents into DocBook format with an arbitrary article header crediting the Wikipedia.

If nobody has some kind of horrible objection to this, I would like to start publishing these sometime in the next few weeks.

Here's a short list of a few that I consider appropriate:

Operating system
Open source
Free software
Linux operating system
Linux kernel
Linux distribution
Debian
Red Hat Linux
Mandrake Linux
Slackware
Conectiva
SuSE
Unix
Richard Stallman
Linus Torvalds
Eric S. Raymond
GNU
Computer
Personal computer
Computer storage
RAM
Virtual memory
Computer networks
Computer security

-- RandyKramer - 25 Jan 2002