18 Aug
2009
18 Aug
'09
9:14 a.m.
On Aug 18, 2009, at 1:01 AM, [Ricardo Rodriguez] Your EPEC Network ICT
Team wrote:
Well I think we both agree:
1) wikis are tools that make it easy to keep stuff up to date and
apply refactorings to content
2) in general it's bad form to loose content
For 2) I was focusing on the content representing the solution in the
design docs which I was proposing to drop from the design doc since I
was proposing to move it elsewhere (in the main doc location). However
I was indeed also suggesting to loose content (which was the comments
in the design docs or some intermediary steps that allowed us to reach
the final solution). However Sergiu didn't agree and I could
understand why. So I backtracked and I've moved done design docs in a
DesignArchive space. At some points it'll get removed but it'll
probably be in a few years now.
Thanks
-Vincent
Hi,
Vincent Massol wrote:
This is the usual question and the answer is usually that you need to
keep a reader able to read them along with the data. Even more you
need to maintain the reader over time to ensure it continues running
on the hardware.
Then how long the data is kept online completely depends on the domain
and use case. In your case you could keep it 10 years online or more.
Provided you have enough disk space and your DB is correctly indexed,
that should work fine.
For a documentation site it's a bit more problematic since the site
needs to be relatively clean and when users go to it they should not
feel it's a mess or a work in progress too much since otherwise this
feeling will reflect on their feeling for the software. In the case at
hand it's acceptable since it's on the dev wiki and not the main
documentation wikis.
This is about cleaning up.
I am almost sure now: I've just jumped into the wrong thread :-( Sorry
if I am adding nothing but noise.
No system can go on indefinitely by keeping
everything online. The
strategy is simple:
- you backup (as we do every day) and remove things that shouldn't be
kept. They're still available on backup should they be needed one
day.
I do agree. But I've a huge problem there: how to decide which
"things"
should not be kept. Yes, they will be on backups, but how to be sure
that "the system" will be able to find them when needed? As for
revisions we'll need a way in the future to be able to
maintain
that too since they grow quite large.
As devs say when you agree, +1 :-)
I don't agree about absolutely keeping old
things online when they're
not needed anymore. If we had done this we would still live with some
mess of xwiki.org as it was back in 2005-2006.
Again, the same problem. How to decide that a "thing" is not needed?
I'm
afraid I must make an effort to present an example. A case study. I am
thinking/working in a research environment. It is really hard to
decide
what could be deprecated at a given moment.
The main point of a wiki is to *NOT* keep stale
things by applying
constant refactorings (which is what I suggest) so I definitely don't
agree about using a wiki as an archival system (there are way better
solutions for that) :)
I agree! I don't think about a wiki (XWiki) as archival system. I
think
that I think (sic) about XWiki like a key piece in an information
system
helping to move textual information (prose explanation about data and
thoughts) into structured documents, then into knowledge.
Perhaps documents can/must not last forever, but years should be
considered as a regular duration for a document life cycle. During
this
time, it is possible that the size of modification won't be an
issue: a
single document won't growth forever, but the number of relations
will do.
I've to read a much more about this! Thank you very much for your thoughts!
Ricardo
--
Ricardo RodrÃguez
Your EPEC Network ICT Team