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Paul D. Buck
Paul D. Buck
Joined: 17 Jan 05
Posts: 754
Credit: 5385205
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Yes, the joke goes ... Man

Yes, the joke goes ...

Man asks a pretty girl at a party if she would go to bed with him for a million dollars, she thinks about it and then say yes. He then asks if she would do it for a dollar and a half. She indignantly ask him, "what type of girl do you think I am?" He says, we established that, now we are negotiating price...

I am probably going to get into trouble on that one...

But, Ageless is right. My hardest part about using Wiki is letting go of my rather rigid standards of quality of writing. Many times I would not put something into the site for weeks until I had it "perfect", so, you did not see the work in progress.

Now, with Wiki, you can actually see the way that i write... it is kinda messy as I tend to be working on many related things at one time. So, by using recent changes and histry of a page, you can see my own refinements. Because it only exposes a small amount of histry, the changes tend to pass by fairly fast.

As another example, you can look at the messages documentation and see that I add many things, but some of the older messages are not formatted as others are. I have been "walking" down the alphabet and am at "F" conforming the messages to a standard "template" with General, version, logs/examples, other messages as the standard elements, even when versions and other messages tend to be "none". But, they are there as reminders that there may be other messages that are NOT in the examples, or should be reinforced there.

Another use of history, for me, is to go and look at what others have done. And as Ageless said, I usually only "touch" the WAY it is said, now what is said. So, all in all, it has been better than I expected, and less painful than I had feared... :)

Thanks guys!

hih_tv-Greg
hih_tv-Greg
Joined: 11 Feb 05
Posts: 94
Credit: 31815
RAC: 0

If a writer of a

If a writer of a "wiki"composes something, and say I respond to it, does my writing be come part of the total message?

Greg

gravywavy
gravywavy
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 392
Credit: 68962
RAC: 0

RE: If a writer of a

Message 12140 in response to message 12139

Quote:
If a writer of a "wiki"composes something, and say I respond to it, does my writing be come part of the total message?

Yes, when you edit a wiki page, you get a screen up very like the one you use to reply to a posting here, but it has the existing text in it. You add what you like, where you like. You remove what you like.

Courtesy says that if you make a major change you add a comment or send a message like this one

Quote:
Hi RiVer - I moved your post on WhatIsaWiki to a separate page. Hope that's okay. It's just that I think it would be useful to have a bit more space to discuss! -- RobertBrook

so that the original author sees what you did and, more important, knows why you did it. If I had not liked RobertBrook's change, I could have changed it all back, in which case courtesy would be that I would leave a post for him to tell him why.

In fact, I did like the change. I deleted his message to me and said nothing more, and he figures out that I am happy with the end result.

Other users visiting the resulting page see a clear message. If you want the history it is all there, but only for a while.

Looking at the revisions now (see the link at the foot of thatpage), all that is shown is the addition of some spam and the removal of it again.

It is now two years since I worked on that page, not even I can tell how much was by Robert, how much by other authors, and how much by me. What I do know is I must have been happy with the end result at the time, cos if I wasn't I'd have gone on editing it till I was. And until Robert was happy as well.

By the way, I don't know Robert, never met him even on wiki apart from that brief collaboration when he beamed down into my page and helped me make it better than i could have done on my own. Swapped comments during the process, and both moved on to other things, never exchanged comments since. If either of us cared about keeping 'ownership' of the text we'd not have been posting on a wiki in the first place.

~~gravywavy

Paul D. Buck
Paul D. Buck
Joined: 17 Jan 05
Posts: 754
Credit: 5385205
RAC: 0

If you look at the Wiki, most

If you look at the Wiki, most of the material that appears there is from my accumulated writings on my traditional site, Hmm, just noticed my signature is wrong ... ah, better ...

Ok, let us say that you read something in ANY of my writing. And you write a note and post it here. If it is good, I would ask (usually) if I could use it. If permitted, I would then copy it in and edit to suit my style. But, yes, the technical content would be your contribution.

There are places, if you look, where I plainly state that the material is from so-and-so ... Just the other day, Rom explained one error message and now his words are in the Wiki. I take material from all sorts of places. So, none of what you see in the documentation is exclusively mine. When I copied (and I am not done there yet either) the developer documentation, mostly what I did was tighten up the nomenclature (something I have been on UCB since day one - is their sloppy use of language and names - they can call the same thing by 5 different names) and the links and page names.

In other writing, for example, I added a table yesterday, Ingleside looked at it and changed it some (I have not looked yet, but, I will doubtless not change a thing as he was expanding on what I started but could not finish).

Does this explain it?

gravywavy
gravywavy
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 392
Credit: 68962
RAC: 0

RE: ...whats a

Message 12142 in response to message 12132

Quote:
...whats a "Wiki"?...

Good question Greg. In retrospect even better than I thought when I first saw it.

I am guessing that these postings, your q's and Paul's and my replies, will later on be stolen to form part of the manual that deals with advice to authors on updating the manual. And of course where Paul and I differ about what we say, there will need to be negotiation, whther we do that negotiation here or on the wiki.

So keep the q's coming for as long as our answers leave gaps in your knowledge: they are, in my opinion, a positive contribution to the manual.

~~gravywavy

Paul D. Buck
Paul D. Buck
Joined: 17 Jan 05
Posts: 754
Credit: 5385205
RAC: 0

So far, :) The way it has

So far, :)

The way it has been working, for the most part to now, is that one of us will put up material, and the others come in and add notes, move words around a bit, and we all move on.

Since I have the most time, I do the most changes, again, to this point. A lot of what I do is still move old material from the old documentation site to the Wiki. The only part of that that is COMPLETELY done is the Glossary. The FAQ is half way or better.

When we do a cycle on edits, again, so far, we have not had any I put it in - you take it out ... part of that is that the people I have allowed in, are knowledgeable people, and so, it is hard to argue with a person that is right...

The only time I got grumpy was when one of THEM ... took out some of my humor. But, that is ok, I left it out.

I would also say that a lot of the edits are classed as minor edits as I had a mistake in markup or something equally silly.

Jord
Joined: 26 Jan 05
Posts: 2952
Credit: 5779100
RAC: 0

RE: In other writing, for

Message 12144 in response to message 12141

Quote:

In other writing, for example, I added a table yesterday, Ingleside looked at it and changed it some (I have not looked yet, but, I will doubtless not change a thing as he was expanding on what I started but could not finish).

Does this explain it?


Link to the page
I on the other hand may want to go in there and edit the width of the table's entries, since it now scrolls off the side of my 1024x768 window. But seeing how I have to CTRL+F5 5 times to clear my complete cache to see the changes, it can take a while. ;)

Okay, having checked the code, I see I can't change the width, but if I were so distressed about it, I could for instance change the used font and size of the font.

gravywavy
gravywavy
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 392
Credit: 68962
RAC: 0

RE: Ok, let us say that

Message 12145 in response to message 12141

Quote:

Ok, let us say that you read something in ANY of my writing. And you write a note and post it here. If it is good, I would ask (usually) if I could use it.

I would ask before using something off a private website, or in a private email. That is not just courtesy, it is also law, at least in England.

I tend to assume that something posted on a public bb, or on a wiki, is fair game to be plagiarised. If I took a recognisable chunk sure I would acknowledge the author, but probably not ask before using.

~~gravywavy

gravywavy
gravywavy
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 392
Credit: 68962
RAC: 0

RE: Link to the page I on

Message 12146 in response to message 12144

Quote:


Link to the page
I on the other hand may want to go in there and edit the width of the table's entries, since it now scrolls off the side of my 1024x768 window. But seeing how I have to CTRL+F5 5 times to clear my complete cache to see the changes, it can take a while. ;)

But now if somebody makes that change, this thread won't make sense any more... ;-)

I agree btw - I'd probably change the column headings, abbreviate them, and add a key underneath. If poss I'd want the table to come right even in a 640x... window.

~~gravywavy

Keck_Komputers
Keck_Komputers
Joined: 18 Jan 05
Posts: 376
Credit: 5744955
RAC: 0

RE: The only time I got

Message 12147 in response to message 12143

Quote:
The only time I got grumpy was when one of THEM ... took out some of my humor. But, that is ok, I left it out.


Sorry about that. That page transfered over so badly I felt proud to get the meaning back into some sembelence of order. Recovering the humor was beyond me.

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