Die EmacsWiki, Die

I've started using Emacs a few years ago (we have a youngun' here!), and EmacsWiki is the best concentrated source of information around Emacs.<p>Which is a crying shame.<p>I agree with the author: while the goal is noble, the implementation is terrible. Discussions and content are mixed up, for example look at the cscope page [1]. Which is the latest and best package for integrating the tool?<p>It's 2012. Unix has had package management for <i>decades</i>. It's the age of app stores, why am I still downloading elisp files from a wiki? I want the equivalent of vimscripts! I want something better!<p>Emacs is an incredibly powerful tool, which has had many features decades before those newfangled IDEs. Unfortunately that also means that there's incredible inertia in the community. Here's hoping that the OP's article can trigger something.<p>[1] <a href="http://emacswiki.org/emacs/CScopeAndEmacs" rel="nofollow">http://emacswiki.org/emacs/CScopeAndEmacs</a>

&#62; <i>The articles are littered with crappy advice confusing beginners, have little structure and are filled with ridiculous questions (questions in an wiki???)</i><p>The original wiki has questions, back-and-forth-discussion and loosely structured content on many pages. Maybe some pages need to be maintained/wikified/deprecated, but the EmacsWiki itself is fine. Also, it was never intended to be the authoritative GNU Emacs wiki. GNU Emacs is self-documenting. The non-standard stuff needs the wiki more.

Having experienced it myself, I tend to agree with the general point that getting started with Emacs is not helped by the online resources available.<p>However, I don't think it is constructive to wish that EmacsWiki would die in order for something better to come up. We are all free to start another wiki, built on any cms we prefer, and if MediaWiki is your choice, go for it. Assemble your moderators, make it better than anything EmacsWiki has provided to date, and you'll be the darling of the Emacs community. <i>That</i> would be constructive. :)

I've never used EmacsWiki, but the tone of this article seems a bit off, mocking the author of EmacsWiki for using his own software, etc.

Poorly written post on several fronts. The English is poor (forgivable), but the points made about the structure and security of wikis are not well taken, and reflect of misunderstanding of WikiNature (<a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiNature" rel="nofollow">http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiNature</a>).<p>On a more practical level, the post points out some flaws in EmacsWiki, asserts that some arbitrary alternatives would be better (MediaWiki vs. OddMuse), but does not propose a path to get there from here or explain how the switch would be worth the work.<p>Personally, I think it would be kind of neat to convert the EmacsWiki into OrgMode, push it to a Git repo and publish it the way Worg is published.

I won't thank you for suggesting GitHub, because after I've taken your suggestion, I will be less free! Gitorious is the superior solution :)

The peepcode on emacs helped me immensely when I tried emacs a few years ago. Emacs is really really daunting for a beginner.<p>I tried emacs for a week , gave up, went back to textmate, and have since switched to vim.

Internet is a nice place ranting... Some years ago, I did an Oddmuse wiki to/from git:<p><a href="http://www.foo.be/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/OddmuseGit" rel="nofollow">http://www.foo.be/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/OddmuseGit</a><p>So you can grab all the emacswiki website (based on Oddmuse) and convert it to your favorite markup/wiki relying on a git repository.<p>s/rant/do/g

Disagree, emacswiki is a great resource.