Thanks to everyone who responded to my perl wiki post. The responses have been enlightening.
A number of people pointed me at the official perl wiki which I came across when I originally searched for perl wiki. The first couple of links I clicked on led me to believe that it was mostly abandoned.
On a second viewing, it is more actively updated than I first believed. In the "What’s New" tab there are 20 updates by various folks since the 20th of December. That’s not a big number, but it is much better than expected. And it is more than the total number of editors of my (non-existent) wiki.
Looking back to 2007, Schwern’s announcement was pretty inspiring. Why didn’t it take off in the same way as the emacswiki?
Some of my Current Issues with Perl Wiki
- www.socialtext.org isn’t a perl url. wiki.perl.org as suggested by Phaylon (or www.perlwiki.something) would be better.
- I couldn’t see a way to get syntax highlighting
- it doesn’t have pretty wikipedia-style links. By that I mean URLs are of the form blah/blah/blah/index.cgi?page_name rather than blah/blah/blah/page_name.
Still, when I weigh that against the fact that there are already other active editors and material which has been indexed by the search engines, it is clearly a better use of my time to become an editor than to try to get yet another perl wiki off the ground.
10 Comments
The URL of the wiki used to be http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/ and that still works. It was moved to the socialtext URL in the summer of 2010 as the old one was running a very old version of socialtext. This one is maintained by the folks at http://www.socialtext.com/ . If I understood correctly, the reason we have the socialtext URL and not a perl or TPF branded one is because socialtext does not support such re-branding.
I have heard several people from the Perl community saying they won’t contribute to this wiki (though I thik most of these happened before the change) because they can’t sign up or they just hate the syntax of it.
I also find it hard to work with this wiki but I keep doing it as I think it has a value to be in the “official” TPF wiki. Even if currently it is not branded to Perl or TPF.
Socialtext has donated this wiki to the Perl community – they do want to help Perl with it. The wiki is an advertising of their software – it is in their benefit to make it important and highly ranked. I am sure they would be open to suggestions from the community about branding and the other issues if we reached some consensus on what we want and provide coherent argumentation.
I’m open to suggestions on how to reach consensus – there must be a better place than this blog to discuss suggestions on what we want from their wiki.
Once we’ve made our wishlist, what is the best way to contact them? I found their community forum (although at a quick glance I couldn’t see an obvious way to post to it). I also found an email of an active admin chap (in case I forget – alan.lepofsky at socialtext.obfuscated)
Top of my wishlist is some way of posting syntax highlighted code. I like the idea of using a javascript plugin such as http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter or another one from http://www.webdesignbooth.com/9-useful-javascript-syntax-highlighting-scripts/
Hey folks,
I’m Luke, one of the core Socialtext devs. I can act as a technical liason if you have any questions – email me: luke socialtext com.
First, some general context. We’ve been hosting the Perl wiki for a few years now, and I recognize that A) no wiki will make everyone happy, B) everyone likes their own wiki syntax and C) Socialtext is fantastic for some situations and less than ideal for others. If the community decides that another service is a better fit, we will understand.
Specifically, a few points raised in this thread:
* Hostname – I’ll double check with our sysadmin to see if there is anything we can do about a better hostname. The community would need to supply some new host, but it should be possible for us to set that up as an alias. No guarantees though.
* Syntax highlighting is not core functionality, but a few years ago someone contributed https://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?action=blog_display;category=vim which uses Vim to do syntax highlighting. I could dust this off and see if I can get it released. This would then support loads of different syntax highlighting.
* Gross links – I also hate seeing index.cgi everywhere, especially since it’s historical cruft – we don’t even have an index.cgi around anymore.
* Hard to work with – I can’t change our wiki syntax in a major way, but I can point you to `wikrad` and `wikedit` – command line tools that use our excellent REST API to allow you to browse and edit the perl5 workspace (or any Socialtext wiki) from your ncurses console + your $EDITOR. I do a tonne of editing in wikrad, and it supports a lot of really cool features.
I recognize that what we have given to the Perl community doesn’t make everyone happy, but please understand that we’re here, we’re not some faceless corp, we love Perl and we will help where we can.
Luke, on behalf of many Socialtext Perl Hackers.
Luke, it is great that you also commented on this thread. Thank you!.
In order to get more of the hard-core perl hackers happy with the wiki it would be important to further promote the solutions you just explained about wikrad and wikedit.
I am very happy that companies using Perl step-up and help the Perl community. Thank you for that. IMHO it would be beneficial to both the companies and to the Perl community if these things were more formalized and clear. (e.g. who gives what and why, who is the contact person, etc.)
The “pretty wikipedia-style links” is a great feature suggestion – I’ll see if I can code it up in time for the next monthly release, while maintaining support with old-style ?pagename links.
Audrey, yet another Socialtext Perl Hacker. :-)
Just one more note. The earlier addresses at The Perl Foundation still work so when I don’t forget I tend to link there from the outside world. So for examples this is the wiki page of the events group
Hi all, thanks for the feedback.
Luke and Audrey, thanks for dropping by. This all sounds great. I’m particularly looking forward to the syntax highlighting and pretty links :) Hopefully it will be possible to develop this further into the high quality wiki perl deserves.
Last night I hacked up a prototype that introduces a few wiki WAFLs for syntax highlighting.
Using the http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/ Javascript plugin, I added some wafls like:
.perl_code
my $foo = “bar”;
.perl_code
As well as support for a bunch of other languages. I have one perplexing bug left, but assuming that gets fixed we can likely release this in our upcoming release.
Well thanks to the constructive criticism in this post, we have used it as a catalyst to add code syntax highlighting for about 20 languages, and we’ve (finally) cleaned up our default URLs. (The latter has been in our Technical Debt Story Pool for ages, it’s fantastic to see it done)
We should see these features released in early February.