[pmwiki-users] Re: Solution converting ISO-8859-1 wikifiles to UTF-8

[Algis Kabaila]

On Monday 18 April 2005 02:06, pmwiki-users-request at pmichaud.com wrote:
> Message: 6
> Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 09:04:35 -0500
> From: "Patrick R. Michaud" <pmichaud at pobox.com>
> Subject: Re: [pmwiki-users] Solution converting ISO-8859-1 wikifiles
>         to UTF-8
> To: Laurent Meister <meister at apfelwiki.de>
> Cc: pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com
> Message-ID: <20050417140435.GF32097 at pmichaud.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 

It's interesting to know that Aggies have the biggest PmWiki, but is not 
everything in Aggie-land biggest in the world - after all, TX is bigger than 
USA, as many maps in Austin will testify.

But what has this to do with iso-8859 to utf-8 conversion?

On a more serious note, I think that it would be useful to have a separate 
forum (mailing list, or a PmWiki forum, or even a PmWiki newbies-Group, or 
even just a simple "flag" in the subject field) for newbies discussion?  
Having tried to follow the discussions on this great mailing list, I find 
that the high technical content is intimidating for newbies, young and old.  
This is not to say that the simple ("stupid") questions are not dealt with 
politely, effectively and with a great deal of sympathy - they are.  And all 
questions **are** indeed encouraged.  

However, when a discussion of technical nature is at such a frenetic pace and 
a new kind of wiki is in its birth pains, how can a simple minded fellow 
(like I), who does not know how to effectively use CSS and is too slow to 
learn (either because he/she has little use for it or for some other reason) 
have the audacity to interrupt the flow of programming suggestions and 
thoughts with some mundane question that has been resolved weeks or months 
ago, but for which he/she can not find an answer?

Now for an example of such a question: I have implemented on our PCUG PmWiki 
here in down-under Canberra a "Guestbook" and a "Forum".  Forum suffers from 
one unnecessary drawback, which IMHO, could be easily rectified - the page 
names, which I think are created from the subject+dateTimeStamp, when 
displayed in large font, overflow the page limits, making the page wider than 
usual (with edit, history etc. menu disappearing out of sight).  

It would help to reduce the length of  the auto generated page names (Perhaps 
using the first word of a subject-dateTimeStamp and a smaller font for page 
names).  How can we do that?

OK, I have now asked a trivial question, so here goes another.

Our PCUG organisation is full of stogie oldies, who are intimidated by the 
very nature of wiki freedoms that allow edit by someone else their writing. 

It would have been less intimidating to first introduce them to a local Forum, 
than a wiki.  What are our chances of having an enhanced PmWiki based forum, 
perhaps a special PmWiki farm?  Perhaps a group of forums, each with its  
title displayed on the side bar?

Pm has made the PmWiki into such a flexible tool that such an enhancement 
should be possible without too great an effort.  You see, forums are less 
intimidating: whilst they allow a free exchange of letters and a free 
discussion, they do not (in general) allow changes of someones' spelling 
mistakes and the like.  And that would be more familiar to many oldies, who 
are used to old fashion newsgroups.  

It would be a smaller step to take than the new world of wiki-freedoms,  
therefore less intimidating.  Newbies might even try the freedoms of Open 
Source and Open Source Operating Systems.  There is an awful lot of people 
who are so hostile to the latter, that it must be the fear of the untried 
that causes such hostility.

Enough ranting - with apologies and thanks for your forbearance.

OldAl.

> On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 12:24:40AM +0200, Laurent Meister wrote:
> > 
> > I'm a little curious, did you know which is the largest pmwiki (for ex. 
> > number of wikipages, included-cookbook receipts, number of farms) or 
> > how many large pmwiki exist?
> 
> My guess is that the TAMUCC wiki is the largest PmWiki at the
> moment.  It's a wikifarm of five wikis, with page counts of:
> 
>     http://falcon.tamucc.edu/wiki         89,929
>     http://firstyear.tamucc.edu/wiki      26,505
>     http://english.tamucc.edu/wiki         7,891
>     http://writing.tamucc.edu/wiki        11,487
>     http://community.tamucc.edu/wiki       1,969
> 
>     (Total pages in the farm: 137,781 pages)
> 
> I don't know how many other "big" pmwikis are out there.
> 
> Pm
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 

-- 
Algis Kabaila
http://www.pcug.org.au/~akabaila