[isabelle-dev] Announcement: The Isabelle Community Wiki

[Makarius]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2012, Brian Huffman wrote:

> I will go ahead and modify the name on the wiki, assuming that nobody 
> objects.

This raises further questions how the wiki is actually organized, or if it 
is organized at all.  So far it looks more like a shared whiteboard on the 
web.  This is fine, but one needs to be aware of the non-permanent and 
non-authentic nature of what is scribbled there.

The technological basis seems to be raw Mediawiki, so there is only some 
rudiment of versioning and a discussion page. E.g. one cannot have a local 
history (say as Mercurial) as one could have on a Bitbucket wiki by 
default.  So all content is at the mercy of that single server.

High-quality content based on Mediawiki, notably Wikipedia, appears to 
require substantial add-on tool support, and administrative structure (a 
formalized social model how changes are propagated).  I know very little 
about how Wikipedia actually does it, apart from what is written in 
recurrent press articles about the infamous German wikipedia section, 
which seems to be obsessed by quality compared to international standards.


 	Makarius