[pmwiki-users] Using PmWiki for authoring a book

Ben Wilson dausha at gmail.com
Thu Aug 24 08:44:06 CDT 2006


My advice on collaboration for a book: lock the wiki down. That is,
use PmWiki's AuthUser security feature to restrict access to the book
pages on a username basis.[1] Naturally, you would not want your
collaborative effort to be scavenged by someone who finds your site.

By way of experience, two friends of mine and I have been
collaborating on a science-fiction setting for, wow, nearly three
years. We started with Twiki but I migrated us to PmWiki in December,
2004. We use email for a lot of our discussion, but firm ideas are
archived on the wiki. Two of us plan on writing fiction based on the
collaboration. I have a seperate farm for organizing my own book.
Although, you're more likely to reach publication than I. :-) If you
do use email, I would recommend a discussion list so the messages are
archived---and naturally secure your work.

Another product you may consider is Lussumo's Vanilla 1 forum.[2] It's
a rather elegant bulletin board program. I've only recently
encountered it, but it impressed me as being well written and has a
fairly tight module developing group orbiting the lone author (sounds
like PmWiki). That may serve as a substituted for email.

[1]: http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki.AuthUser;
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/AuthUser
[2]: http://lussumo.com/

On 8/24/06, Tom Backer Johnsen <backer at psych.uib.no> wrote:
> Some colleagues and I ara planning a textbook, and one of the ideas
> that came up was to use a wiki to collaborate on the text.  Does
> anybody have experience in this direction?
>
> I have downloaded PmWiki and have just started looking at it.  With my
> very limited experience with the subject I am wondering how to set it
> up.  At least part of the project would have to be at least password
> protected against unwanted editing, perhaps invisible to other that
> the authors as well.
>
> Any suggestions as to how to set the thing up?
>
> Tom
>
>
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>


-- 
Ben Wilson
"All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man." HDT




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