[Air-L] AoIR Wiki Was: A suggestion for reading lists and syllabi

Alexander Halavais halavais at gmail.com
Mon Aug 5 21:35:51 PDT 2013


Not as dated as you may think.

Some context and history, for what its worth. I believe strongly that
a wiki would be a useful thing. So do many others. For several years I
carefully extracted the bibliographic discussions from AIR-L and put
them on the wiki. If you look back you will find my periodic "put it
on the wiki" messages. I was the only one editing the wiki.

Well, that's not entirely true. When the wiki was open to the public,
I and every spammer on the planet were the only editors. Wiki
gardening takes a lot of time, particularly on the despamming side.
For some time Jeremy also was kind enough to track on this. With the
previous membership system, I linked accounts so that signed in
members could edit. Eventually, someone still spammed it (MediaWiki is
a nice target and unless carefully maintained gets easily exploited).
But it was a bit moot, because there seemed little interest--it
basically got near zero hits. Moreover, we now have transitioned to a
maintained membership system (Wild Apricot) that makes such shared
authentication near impossible.

For the last few years, there have been calls to resuscitate the wiki.
I'm very happy for this to happen (and I would actually suggest we do
it through a pbworks or Wikia site, for a number of reasons that I
would be happy to elucidate if anyone cares), but not alone. Three
people have volunteered to act as maintainers in that time, but none
have followed through. I cast no stones--it's something that I have
myself have failed to prioritize, in large part because of the lack of
contributors and visitors. Spread around, it's not as much work, but
someone has to keep it up--and read it--or it's not worth the time.

To move this out of the realm of the virtual and into the actual or
something (paging Prof. Lévy?), I went ahead and started up a Wikia
page: http://aoir.wikia.com/wiki/AoIR_Wiki

I will further do an effort-matching pledge. For each of the next 50
edits to the site, I will match with my own contribution.

- Alex






On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh, good to know! And boy does this wiki need an update. I'm surprised we
> don't have regular "add it to the wiki" messages when people ask to compile
> reading lists and syllabi!
>
> How do we go about getting accounts for the wiki? My guess is the
> "transitioning the membership system" message is pretty outdated...



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