Beeminder Wiki?

Has anyone created a Beeminder wiki yet? There’s so much great stuff being built by so many people (integrations, scripts, articles, a book, user styles, etc), it would be great if we had a place where we could collaboratively keep track of it all.

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Someone did try 5 years ago but it didn’t go anywhere: Interested in a Beeminder Wiki?

I say that merely as a statement of fact, not as a way to discourage you. I like the idea of a wiki too, though personally I would not have much time/effort to spare on curating it.

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Hmm, thanks for the context.

I’m still interested in throwing something up, even if I end up being the one doing most of the curating.

I’m thinking maybe a super dumb GitHub repo containing markdown files, turned into a site using GitHub Pages? We could always get fancier later, but seems like that would be the simplest / cheapest way to get things started. Also forking, issues, etc…

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:heart_eyes: Thank you for proposing this! My answer from last time stands:

But I sure want to be proven wrong on that and, to reemphasize, will help in whatever way makes sense. Including making people I’ve gotten to know from here in the forum (like @narthur) collaborators on Beeminder’s GitHub org if that’s where it makes sense to host such a thing. (Would just need you to sign beeminder.com/cla.)

PS: One new slightly wiki-like thing since that last thread is help.beeminder.com (but I know you mean something focused on the broader community, which sounds wonderful).

PPS: Also potentially relevant is the Beeminder Integrations MEGALIST

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I think this could work much more than a beeminder subreddit could. With a subreddit you need a constant stream of new stuff; a wiki can stay there and occasionally accumulate new information.

People can check once in a while new changes made to pages to make sure no anonymous user has gone on a deletion rampage and maybe add something cool they’ve thought about, or one can go there and search for the information that’s being slowly accumulating.

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I think that would be the logical place to put it if we were to make it available at wiki.beeminder.com or beeminder.com/wiki. Is that something you’d like to do?

Also, if we did that, would that mean that everyone who wanted to submit a pull request would need to sign the CLA?

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Just sent an unsolicited CLA signature, just in case I happen to send some PRs in the future :slight_smile:

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Yeah, perfect. Let’s say wiki.beeminder.com because then it can be hosted on GitHub and cname’d or whatever.

Oh, no, just for someone who was helping set it up or wanted to push changes directly instead of as PRs. Er, I think. For code I guess we’d need that signed even to accept PRs. For prose that wouldn’t make sense but this might be a @mary question.

We can figure it out case-by-case in the meantime!

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What’s the advantage to having folks do PRs and running a site out of Github Pages rather than using the Github wiki feature?

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Ah, yeah, as long as it’s a public repo (and we could make one just for this) then the built-in wiki might be great. That’s what I used for the Commits.to spec, for example: https://github.com/commitsto/commits.to/wiki – but that may still require PRs for outside people to make changes?

We could also model it on the Beeminder API docs: https://github.com/beeminder/apidocs

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Are there good wiki services for those for whom the word Github strikes fear into their hearts? Are there wikis that are super user-friendly, with only a little power compromised?

Alternatively, we could use the documents pages we have and update the documents ourselves with user-submitted content, since submissions will need to be reviewed anyway. So it would have the same format as the other pages, and we could make use of the very pretty https://help.beeminder.com/collection/1-beeminder-help It wouldn’t be a wiki, so much as our regular manual / help pages, but very helpfully updated with user content.

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I agree with all the things! We can accept content for things like help.beeminder.com but also if @narthur is inspired to make a wiki on GitHub with more user-ish / third-party kind of content than makes sense for help.beeminder.com there’s absolutely a big green light for that too!

As for a less intimidating wiki than GitHub, let’s assume GitHub is the best we’ve got for now and if something more compelling pops up we’d migrate. (It’s very true that GitHub is intimidating for non-programmers and that’s a big downside.)

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this is for the more user-ish content wiki - I think it makes the most sense for it to be separated from the official help:

a mediawiki instance is out, right? anyone wants a giant pile of PHP on their server? :slight_smile:

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And we can also borrow wiki content for the help docs and have it both ways. (We should probably include a “Yeah, we’re totally going to plagiarize your content, so you should be cool with that if you’re posting here” warning :slight_smile: )

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Does anyone know if there’s something like https://www.gitbook.com/ that would give a more user-friendly wiki-like user interface to a GitHub repo? My wish list would be:

  • Modern editing interface
  • Retains commit history in GitHub
  • Can handle users forking and editing in GitHub without using the tool
  • Doesn’t limit the number of users who can edit
  • Uses straight markdown files, or close to it
  • As a consequence of the previous, is publishable to any domain via GitHub Pages
  • Free… =P

Maybe I’m asking for the world. But GitBook would be ideal if it didn’t charge by the user. (It’s meant for teams to build documentation, not for allowing unlimited visitors to edit a wiki.)

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CLA / CC-BY?

I’d be quite interested in a wiki too.

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