Penguin
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Timeline

2002

June

July

September

November

December:

2003

February

March

June

July

2004

March

August

  • 13: A bunch of new features added to the wiki - page expiry, If-Modified-Since, mod_gzip, IPv6, UTF-8, RSS, mod_headers (Cache-control:), SOAP.

October

2005

January

February

June

July

August

September


PerryLorier's first-hand perspective

This is a heavily shuffled but otherwise lightly edited version of Perry's post to the NZLUG MailingList.

When I first started the WlugWiki I didn't think it would work out. I thought that people would spam it, or we wouldn't get critical mass behind it for people to use it. It would contain lots of rubbish and very little content. The only reason I gave it a shot was because I saw how successful the c2 wiki was and how it didn't seem to have the problems I thought there would be. So I gave it a go with my "little" test to see what would happen.

The WlugWiki was originally started by me one long weekend in 2002 as a place to put annotations on ManPages and to start updating the HowTo documents that were horribly out of date. I started by running PhpWiki with a few simple local customisations on my home DSL. I imported all the ManPages from my computer, and all the HowTos from the TLDP and encouraged people to update them to contain any information that they'd be keen on.

Funny story: my insistence at getting the wiki working meant I didn't stop typing when I should have, and that I believe was the major contributing factor to my having to seek medical help at the time for my sore wrists. Nothing was permanently damaged, and now I'm a wiser person. If your wrists hurt even a little bit, stop typing. My wrists have been fine for about 2.75 years now without even the slightest hint of pain, so the story is merely funny in retrospect, as opposed to a painful lesson for others.

What really happened was that nobody actually edited the ManPages/HowTos except me. I've done a job of cleaning up section 2 of the ManPages (eg: fstat(2)). I went through, created hyperlinks for stuff, wrote wiki pages for Signals and errno values, and wrote some example code demonstrating features. I got about as far as the pages starting with "s" before I got bored and gave up. One day I'll merge our changes upstream, one day... I still write pages on programming topics as I find things that don't have good examples/descriptions on the web. AFAIK the pages I wrote for the various Signals (such as SIGSEGV) and errnos (such as ETXTBSY) are among the few pages on the InterNet really describing what they mean.

Meanwhile everyone else was busy writing wiki pages for problems they had and what the solutions were. People asking me questions would be told after the answer that they now had to go write a wiki page about what they learnt. This quickly meant we built up a whole heap of pages covering little things that people wish they knew but had never seen written down anywhere. Some of these pages became extremely useful and popular. Some even became the definitive source of information on the subject. Others are just weird cultural references.

We eventually moved the wiki off my home DSL onto other machines, eventually ending up with its present location running on the WlugServer, where it has been ever since. We have made heaps of changes to our wiki software, mostly to defeat spammers, to customise it to our uses, and to make it more search engine friendly. The WlugWiki currently averages about 50,000 hits a day.

The wiki is probably our most valuable resource after our members. It contains the distilled knowledge not only of our members, but of people in the general Linux community. Questions can often be answered with a link to the wiki and the quip "The Wiki Knows All". If the wiki doesn't know what you need to know, when you find the answer, wiki it so that other people can find it (actually, more importantly so you can find it yourself when you have to figure out how you solved that problem last time). Try this wikiing thing on our wiki, we love people to come and add new content. Think of some problems you've had recently and add them to the wiki, learn how it works, and why it works. Have a look around at what content we have already. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

One of the major things that the WlugWiki has going for it is a great culture. We have lots of people watching RecentChanges/RecentEdits like hawks, tidying up entries rapidly (cleaning up formatting, spelling, grammar, tpyos, misunderstandings and errors etc). We consistently have several edits a day, which means the wiki is steadily growing in size. We have a culture to wiki all answers to any question that comes up in case we ever need to know it again, or if we find a neat link to add it to the wiki so that others may find it and use it too. The wiki counts over 7000 pages, 3000 of which have been written from scratch by those who have passed our very simple IQ test of asking people for their name. (This seems to be extremely successful at thwarting spammers and those that shouldn't comment, although we still get lots of people who think that when we ask for someone's "real name" we mean something else.)

Lessons learned:

  • Nothing beats wikis for taking notes. The low barrier to entry makes it easy to wiki a few lines here and there when you find the answer to a problem; it is what makes the wiki grow. Then people come and clean up the additions, annotate them and generally improve whatever you said. Anything more rigorous than asking for someone's name makes it too easy to postpone the note-taking to "later", stifling growth.
  • The problem of abuse does arise sometimes, but by having a good culture of people who militantly look at every change (it's a great way to learn!) we very quickly see people who are stupid and revert their changes. Each page has a history kept for several days (or several revisions whatever is larger) so nothing is ever truly lost.
  • Don't try to be a TLDP/ManPages clone, as the WlugWiki was supposed to be. It never was. People use man(1) to read ManPages, and nobody reads official TLDP HowTos anymore, they use Google and find a page that sounds authoritative and follow that. So writing authoritative sounding pages works better than trying to update outdated TLDP HowTos.