The State of the Wiki
Posted by Mike Gunderloy February 10, 2009 @ 02:03 AM
The new and revitalized Rails Wiki launched about two weeks ago, so it’s time for a progress report back to the Rails community. The short answer: things are going well. We’ve had nearly a hundred edits, dozens of topics put in place, and an active discussion on the wiki mailing list. Translators are already at work making the wiki content available in multiple languages. For topics ranging from a first Rails application walkthrough to handling timezones, the new wiki is already a spot to go for quality Rails content.
The wiki team has applied lessons learned from the old Rails wiki, which has gone from being a comfortable spot to find out a few things to a cluttered mess over the years. They started out by defining an overall structure and figuring out what warranted coverage in the wiki. Then they protected a few pages from edits and set up a login system to encourage accountability. The result, so far, is a very promising start at an information resource that can benefit all Rails developers.
But there’s plenty more to do. If you take a look at the new wiki home page you’ll find a bunch of topics in red with dashed underlines. Those are topics that we want, but that no one has written yet. If you have a few minutes to give back to the community, why not drop by? Whether it’s drafting a new topic from scratch, revising an existing topic to be more clear or correct, adding links to high-quality external resources, or translating the wiki into another language, there’s plenty left to do – and just about every Rails developer should be able to contribute.
why not use the rails guide layout for wiki?
Being new to Rails I thought I would make to comments on the wiki.
1) I noticed the team went with DokuWiki. I both commend and scold them—it’s a solid wiki and after reading the discussion group I think it was sensible (and bold) to go with a non-rails solution. But, after being lured to Rails after the popular “Wiki in 20 minutes” video, it’s somewhat disheartening to see it’s not a rails based wiki.
2) I think the wiki really needs a “discussion” section/page for each article. This is a really useful feature for people make comments on the content of wiki articles without messing them up with inline questions and the like.
All around great effort guys and I can’t wait to finish my first Rails project :).
@daniel this is a really good idea, the Rails Guides new design is really nice. We just need to find someone willing to port over the design.
@jason you are probably referring to the “weblog in 15 minutes” video, we never released a “wiki in 20 minutes” video ;) The reality is that we did not find a Rails solution that was just as good as DokuWiki and we are pragmatic developers so we chose what’s best out there while encouraging Rails developers to write an awesome solution we can switch to. (few people are already working on different wiki projects).
We are planning on adding an option to discuss the articles once we will have a more stable content.
Thanks for keeping us on our toes.
- Matt
It’s always a pleasure to read one of Mr. Gunderloys prophetic and profit free posts.
However, after clinking on the ‘Rails Wiki’ link, I have to say I’m shocked. This has got to be one of the ugliest interfaces I’ve seen for a documentation site.
I think someone should be choked for this gaff!
It’s bad enough that the Django documentation is fantastic and also looks sweet. But the Rails scaffolds look like #$x%x compared to the Django admin. Doesn’t anyone know CSS?
I know it, it’s not how you look, but how you feel that counts. Well now we look and feel like $#&*.
I think Rails needs a face lift!
Dear Rails Fanboy, this is a pretty recent project and we did not really start working on the design yet. If you are offering your help with the CSS, I’d be glad to get you all the information you might need.
Hopefully some people from the Ruby Design ML will be able to shine.
- Matt
@Matt Aimonetti, I’m in Ruby Design ML and good to know that the idea is well accepted. It is very important to maintain the visual identity of the project. I will not compromise to help in this task right now because I’m currently working on the translation of guides to pt-br. But if no one do this in near future, I can help.
I like the new wiki, even though many things have to be done. But I created an account and translated a small article already to German and inserted some sections into an English one.
I agree that would be nice to use rails guides layout because this one really sucks :)
I know you guys from 37signals pick up the best solution for this project but I think it is a little shame that rails wiki runs on php solution….What was wrong with instiki? of course it would need some improvements but I am sure there will be a bunch of guys who will be willing to do it…
I really loved instiki :)
On the other hand it is really nice to see some big changes on rails documentation lately.
@Matt
My apologies on the “Wiki in 20 minutes” confusion, I mixed up your introduction screencast with TurboGears. _;
(I know I know, let the public whippings commence :] )