I've heard from several different people and directions lately that there is a growing desire to see us develop a better "Introduction" or "encyclopedia" or "wiki" for our work on Epicurus.
As most of you know, we do already have a wiki here, but it is not well organized or well developed. There's a lot of good material there, but it needs a fundamental structural rework to make the pages shorter and more focused to particular points.
I agree that this is a particularly important project, and for the same reason I am also concerned that the effort we put into it be "durable." As much as I like our current forum software, as the years go by and the sizes of our files get bigger and bigger, we need to make sure that the content is easily downloadable and movable to new web hosts so as to guard against unforeseen future problems. The current system lends itself to easy connection to our current forum, so we can easily control who can make updates and changes, but for ease of portability and future-proofing, I am considering switching to the Dokuwiki format (we already have a rudimentary example here). Dokuwiki is not the latest and greatest and flashiest design, but it is made of pure text files which can be zipped up, saved, and transferred to a new host with very little effort. I want people to be able to download and save the wiki as often as they desire so that they can make sure their own investment is safe, so for that reason I'll probably implement a Dokuwiki version even if we stay within the forum for the time being. For that reason I probably don't want to use Mediawiki, even though it's by far the "market leader" - being the basis of Wikipedia. Most of the basics that Mediawiki provides can be done through Dokuwiki, and I think the survivability of the site by making it easy to save and reuse copies is worth the tradeoff in features.
This will be a big project and take time, but a wiki allows collaboration and that can bring to bear a force multiplier effect where a group can do much more than one person.
It is quite possible that it would make sense to repurpose the EpicurusCollege.com domain for this purpose, and present the wiki/encyclopedia in terms of self-study course in Epicureanism. That site is currently set up to implement a Moodle instance, which we've never implemented, and it may well be that moodle is extremely overshooting the mark for what we need at this point.
So I've set up this thread for comments on basic ideas and suggestions on how to proceed. I actually think that what might be most helpful would be if people can provide links to example wikis on other subjects where they particularly like the organizational style and structure. It's going to be hard to copy the "look" of the flashy dedicated wikis, but I think the key is to grasp how best to lay out a wiki, and how much information to include on one page before linking off to subpages. That's a highly subjective decision but I feel sure that the current wiki has far too few pages, with too much data on each page. On the other hand I am sure it is very easy to have too many pages, and to require too much jumping back and forth.
This will take weeks even to get started, but there's no time like the present to start talking about it.
- What would you like to see?
- How would you like to see it organized?
- What other organizational questions do you think need answering , and on which we should ask for feedback?