[pmwiki-users] Minor question regarding the definition of "Wiki farm"

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 05:33:47PM +0100, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Mar 2006, Neil Herber wrote:
> 
> > If the admin does intend to add another wiki, the terminology problem
> > goes away as soon as he does so.
> 
> Don't you care that it's incorrect/inaccurate meanwhile? 

It's not inaccurate, just imprecise.  And the essence of good 
instruction is knowing what details to leave in and which to
leave out.  

> It bugs me that the phrasing is incorrect (that's just the way I am), but
> it's not so important by itself. I just don't want someone thinking that
> they *have* to use more than one wiki in order to set up things "farm
> style". 

I didn't get that sense from the instructions or the examples.
To me, setting up a single wiki *is* setting it up farm style --
there's not that big a distinction between the two.

> Hmm... speaking of correctness... I'm going to describe an installation
> with two wikis that share components. Would you say that the following is
> a wiki farm?
> [...]

Personally, I wouldn't worry about whether it's technically
a "wiki farm" or not.  Just as there can be more than one way
to configure a single wiki, there can be more than one way to
set up a system to support multiple wikis.  I don't think it's
important to be able to say "if you configure your site this
way, it's a farm, otherwise it's not."

What is important is to help people with the question of
"Can I run multiple wikis from a single source installation,
and how do I do that?"  For convenience of explanation we use
the term "WikiFarm" to describe setups where multiple wikis
use the same codebase, but that doesn't mean there aren't
other or hybrid ways of achieving the same goal, or that
those cannot be called "farms". 

Pm