[pmwiki-users] Looking for articles/reviews about PmWiki

Petko Yotov 5ko at 5ko.fr
Sun Oct 2 07:28:46 CDT 2011


On Sunday 02 October 2011 10:26:12, Eric Forgeot wrote :
> > PmWiki was very popular in the past because it was one of the first
> > wikis/CMSs written in PHP at a moment when cheaper hosting providers
> > started providing PHP in addition to static HTML,
> 
> I didn't know PmWiki was that old. It would worth mentionning it on the
> wiki (date of creation or first release)

The very first version 0.1 was released January 8, 2002, that is almost 10 
years ago. We should think about the birthday party, and what we should have 
done before that date: improving the homepage and the documentation, updating 
the translations...?

> About the {{notability}} and {{primary sources}} tags added on the
> PmWiki page on WP, I see they were added by an unregistered user from
> Poland. Don't you think it could be a kind of vandalism? Wouldn't it be
> possible to revert this random and non justified action?

It is not vandalism. BTW, on Wikipedia like on all open wikis, it is 
recommended to assume good faith. This is some regular editor who didn't 
notice that he/she had been logged out.

For someone who doens't know about PmWiki and only visits the Wikipedia 
article and the pmwiki.org homepage, the notability of PmWiki may look 
unclear. And yes, the article cites mostly primary sources, but theese claims 
are non-controversial technical details about the software and are best 
described by its developer community.

I see this as an opportunity, we can greatly improve the Wikipedia article 
which will present PmWiki much better than now. :-)

This effort is in the same direction as the discussions about improving the 
content and the appearance of the pmwiki.org homepage. (Just in time!)

> With 5 books mentionning PmWiki and hundreds of websites using it, the
> PmWiki's notability couldn't be seriously questionned.

There are at about 30 books and research papers in Google Scholar mentioning 
"pmwiki.org", which means that they have reviewed PmWiki. (Thanks to Carlos.)

  http://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=%22pmwiki.org%22

(A search just for "pmwiki" will return hundreds more papers, but they only 
cite other publications on pmwiki installations, they don't talk about 
PmWiki.)

A funny thing is that in two random papers which I opened, the authors 
regretted a "missing" functionality which PmWiki actually has but obviously 
they didn't find it. :-)

> It could also be interesting to copy the whole PmWiki article on
> pmwiki.org, "just in case".

Don't worry, we'll fix it sooner than that. A complete overwrite is also 
possible.

> I see many webdesigners using wordpress as a basis for their work
...
> Maybe PmWiki, if it would have been visually
> more attractive at first sight, could have suit their need too.

Maybe. But those people are curiuos and educated so I think they know what 
they're doing.

They may also be just young and/or not part of the wiki culture: 
collaboration, evolving articles, blank text area, a wiki markup as an 
additional layer of punctuation, fist add a link then click on it to create a 
page etc...

Petko



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