pages tagged kingyakkinghttp://yakking.branchable.com/tags/king/yakkingikiwiki2015-09-16T11:00:15ZWikishttp://yakking.branchable.com/posts/wikis/William Holland2015-09-16T11:00:15Z2015-09-16T11:00:07Z
<p>Once upon a time a great King wrote a glorious script called <code>foo1.2</code>.</p>
<p>However, after the fifth or sixth person, the King grew tired of explaining to
people how to use his script.
To remedy this he got the royal scribe to write a little
<a href="https://www.drupal.org/node/2181737">README</a> containing everything his subjects
needed to know to use the script.</p>
<p>By the release of <code>foo2.2</code> it had grown into a host of scripts and the README
became unmanageable. At this point the king decided to commision the writing of
<a href="http://liw.fi/manpages/">man pages</a>.</p>
<p>Many peaceful years later the documentation had grown into a complex web of
cross-referenced manpages and dozens of peasants each week were complaining
that they could not find the information they needed.</p>
<p>So the king commanded his
clerks to simplify the manpages and to create a wonderful
<a href="http://blog.wikibrains.com/a-brief-history-of-wikis/">wiki</a> to hold all the
other information which lived on through the ages, and was marvelled at for
thousands of years.</p>
<hr />
<p>Okay maybe this story is completely made up but, wikis are useful for big or
small projects. Most people these days are familiar with the format of a wiki;
people can easily navigate to the information they need and more importantly,
easily edit the infomation there.</p>
<p>There are several wiki engines readily availiable. By far the most popular of
these is <a href="https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki">mediawiki</a>, which was
developed for Wikipedia. It is easy to set up and runs almost anywhere (I once
ran it on a Rasberry Pi). If you have an aversion to touching <a href="https://www.php.net/">PHP</a> to write your
own, there are plenty of plugins and themes floating around on the internet.</p>
<p>With the rising popularity of <a href="http://git-scm.com/">git</a> several git-backed wikis have become popular.
GitHub's solution <a href="https://github.com/gollum/gollum/wiki">Gollum</a> is very
popular, in part because of the wide variety of markup it supports and in part
because of the hosting offered by GitHub.</p>
<p>If you are a grumpy old fart like me then you will love git-backed wikis
because they allow you to edit from the command-line rather than in the browser.
I have known people turn web-editing off completely, but this may not be advisable
since it will put an awful lot of people off and is against the spirit of wikis,
being that they should be quick to edit. If a passing user does not know how to
use git then it will not be quick to edit at all.</p>
<p>The option which Yakking has opted for is
<a href="https://ikiwiki.info/setup/">Ikiwiki</a>. Ikiwiki is also git-backed and uses
markdown. Ikiwiki is painless to get running.</p>
<p>In conclusion wikis are great for large and small projects because they are
easy to run, easy to use and quick to edit, for better or worse.</p>