[Pipet Devel] Wiki for Piper?

[Brad Chapman]

Hey All;
	During the BOSC/ISMB conference that Jeff and I were at last
week, I became a serious Wiki convert, and was thinking that Wiki might
be the solution to lots of documentation needs for Piper.

Basically Wiki is an environment for collaboratively building web pages.
In this case, I think it would be great environment to work on
documentation and idea building for Piper. Wiki allows you edit html
pages with a simple markup system for bolding, verbatim and other fun
stuff.

What would people think about trying to adopt a Wiki type system for
doing basic Piper documentation? I think the advantages are:

1. Easy to learn and work with -- makes it quick and easy for us to put
together documentation and ideas.

2. We don't have to fight over docbook versus LaTeX versus AbiWord versus
LyX or whatever for just putting together docs.

3. This might encourage other people besides developers to contribute to
ideas, etc.

As far as I can see the disadvantages are:

1. It is a web only format, so it couldn't be distributed as pdf,
postscript, etc. I guess to get around this we would just need to have
someone put together documentation in a format like LaTeX once a Wiki
page got interesting enough to deserve it. Or, Wiki could just be
something that goes along with documentation.

2. It could get messy if no one goes in and cleans it up every once in a
while.

So what do you all think? I set up a very nice python wiki, the MoinMoin
wiki (http://moin.sourceforge.net) on my local machine. It was pretty
easy to set up and configure and only requires python and a web server (I
am using apache). You can check it out and play around on it here:

http://24.9.210.117/piperwiki/moin.cgi

If people think this is a good idea I have no problems setting it up on
the bioinformatics.org site (probably with a bit of help from Gary to
learn my way around :-). Thanks for reading -- I look forward to hearing
your feedback!

Brad