WikEmacs: The Other Emacs Wiki

I’d like to apologize to everyone insulted by my previous posts. Contrary to popular belief I acknowledge EmacsWiki’s contribution to the Emacs community. Obviously many people are too fond of its current format so I doubt that it will ever change (considerably). I didn’t mean to insult anyone, I just wanted to catch your attention (which unfortunately requires harsher words from time to time) and point it in the direction of the existing problems.

For the people that weren’t happy with EmacsWiki - the ones that felt my pain and were looking for a change I present WikEmacs (pronounced wikimacs). It’s a MediaWiki powered Emacs wiki, that will try to bring to the community cleaner, leaner and more up-to-date documentation.

There are only a few guidelines for the contributors there:

• articles should be geared only towards the current and future versions of Emacs (currently 23 and 24) for maintainability’s sake.
• articles should not copy Emacs’s or extension’s official documentation - they should refer to it instead. An overview, some nice pointers, tips and links - that seems like a good article, doesn’t it?
• comments and questions should go to an article’s discussion page

File uploads are disabled on WikEmacs (but image file uploads will probably be allowed soon) - it will never host Emacs extensions of any sort.

There is a Google discussion group here for more general questions regarding the wiki.

Our goal is not to copy over the 8500 articles available at EmacsWiki. It’s to provide a good road map for new users coming to Emacs and enough helpful hints and tips for experienced users. Everyone is welcome to join our efforts.

As far as short term goals go - have a look at the outlined structure of the wiki (on its home page), pick a section that interests you and create/extend/improve it. Our content is licensed with GNU’s Free Documentation License (which is compatible with Wikipedia’s and probably EmacsWiki’s GPL2). Some nice blog articles about Emacs might be converted to wiki articles with permission from their authors. You might find pandoc useful to automatically convert articles from other formats to MediaWiki markup and mediawiki.el to edit articles on wiki from the comfort of your beloved editor.

Thanks to the people that brought us the original EmacsWiki. Thanks to everyone who supported the idea for the new wiki. Thanks in advance to all future contributors.

Some people will undoubtedly see the birth of WikEmacs as a separatist move to fraction the Emacs community. To them I’d like to say that few things in life are as productive as competition. Obviously a lot of people willing to contribute to a new wiki are unwilling to do so for EmacsWiki and vice versa. This is not a contest and there will be no winner. I wish the best of luck to EmacsWiki and its supporters. What I wish for is to give our community the best source of documentation available and the option to choose.