[pmwiki-users] Wiki farm confusion

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 09:26:12PM +0100, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> The Editor schrieb:
> > P.S. For those of you who are longterm PmWiki users, or professional
> > programmers, it may be difficult to appreciate how exciting it was for
> > me to find simple, creative analogies used to explain how this
> > software works. After working extensively, and frustrating with
> > several complex, high-powered CMS's, PmWiki was a breath of fresh air.
> > Another analogy!  :)
> [...]
> I don't have a good term handy. I don't think that agricultural 
> analogies are very helpful though - they are all associated with too 
> many different things (unsurprisingly: agriculture is one of the most 
> time-honored activities of humanity).

FWIW, the choice of the term "WikiFarm" was originally predicated
on the computing phrase "server farms", and not the agricultural 
metaphor.  

OTOH, "server farms" probably does have the agricultural meaning
at its foundation, as in "sheep farm" or "dairy farm".

Where things may have gone too far is when we adopted the term "field",
bring WikiFarms squarely into the agricultural metaphor.  But going 
back to the original concept: a "server farm" doesn't contain "fields", 
it contains "servers".  

Thus a WikiFarm doesn't contain fields, it should have "wikis".
And we should probably end the analogy there.

Pm