Re: [Axiom-developer] Front page esthetic

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

"Bill Page" <address@hidden> writes:

| Gaby,
| 
| On August 1, 2006 12:40 AM you wrote:
| > ... 
| > Why is having the front-page as wiki a plus?
| > For all I know, only a handful of people can actually modify 
| > that page.
| 
| Although the FrontPage is the FrontPage of the Axiom Wiki, unlike
| other pages on the wiki, we decided not to let visitors modify it,
| otherwise we might be just a little to open to vandalism. So for the
| Axiom Wiki FrontPage it is true that only a handful of people can
| actually modify it.

I don't propose we make the frontpage freely modifiable.  Quite the
contrary.  I'm very happy that only a handful of trusted people will
have write access to that page.  This is why I come to the observation
that having the frontpage as a wiki does not look to me like a plus or
an improvement over others sites we've been comparing to.

[...]

| This is another very important observation. I have to admit that
| contrary to my "great expectations" it seems to me that so far we
| have gained very little benefit from trying to maintain the Axiom
| website as a wiki. It is true (for the most part) that the maintenance
| of the contents of the Axiom web site (with the obvious exception of
| the live Axiom and Reduce interface) could have been done using CVS
| on Savannah or SourceForge. Contrary to the intent of the wiki, it
| seems that almost all of the contributions to the Axiom web site
| have been by people who are also active Axiom developers and are
| quite familiar with using tools like CVS.

Although I'm not a great fan of wiki (probably because I'm showing my
age :-)), I do understand and see what might be its benefits.  And as
a matter of fact, I've found some wiki pages very useful.

However, I find more useful to be able to work offline -- that is I
don't need to connect to the web before being able to browse the
wealth of information.  This is because I don't always work online.
Having the same (at least a good part of) information in some form
that does not require connectivity is great.  I don't propose we
duplicate effort.  I'm just observing.

| As I have said several times already, I am quite disappointed by
| the lack of active contributions to the Axiom Wiki.

In its current form, how many people (say posting to this list) know
Axiom, have time to document and go online and have fun with Wiki?

First, we need a critical mass.  Anything we can do to lower the entry
barrier is good.  I'm just giving my feedback about some of the
current setup.


[...]

| Anyway, I would very much like to hear from other Axiom developers
| about the issue of whether it makes sense to continue to try to
| maintain the main Axiom web site as a Wiki.

I don't propose you destroy eveything :-)

-- Gaby