A converting software from html/sgml/xml to wiki is required

Basically I always thought that single and strong effort on converting from html to wiki is good enough to power-up the wiki. But the recent days gave me other thoughts. A closer look at tlkd.org show almost 500 howtos and that is too much for a single man with limited time and knowledge. And I would say that all the additional work is needed because of the errors made by the actual parser. So, no extra work is required by default but since the parser of html to wiki is not perfect one that extra work is needed for successful and appropriate conversion.

Actually I have 2 ideas for html to wiki convertion, the first one is the perl utility perl2wiki and second one is just Open Office. From what I have seen they both make mistakes and they both are not perfect so their produced files need extra work. Recently I got experience with one great thing in linux – flex and bison. They could possibly fix all that problems and probably produce effective working wiki text file ready for importation to the wiki.Delete post

My thoughts about the LDP

LDP, the Linux documentation project is in strange position right now. I would clasify the it as dead or almost dead. Too bad for such a nice project but all things at this world have end some time. So, probably this is the time for LDP. But actually not this time.

Yeah the project is in trouble, because of the lack of contributors, authors, editors, lack of everything and everyone. I have no idea how this project manage to survive so  long until now. Probably there was a time when it was active but at the current moment the activity is equal to zero.

Most of the reasons responsible for the project failure are no coordination and weak organization. The whole model of work is weak, and not just that. There is huge number of documents and materials, howtos, tutorials and other stuff that just sit and take dust. That documentation is getting older and older even now at this second. That means at every spent moment that documentation becomes inappropriate for the current version of the software.  Basically I told my opinion about the work at LDP and now we try to build wiki that for the moment is continuously spammed by some very aggressive spammers.

How bad, the “spammer” today is not just a hobby but a job. In most cases even very well paid job. So, if we want to create that wiki a reliable protection is needed. So, I would clasify the following work needed to be done in LDP:

• Spam protection at Wiki
• Importing of all the documentation
• probably new web site, the one now is too old

At that point I would remark that already 5 or maybe 6 HOWTOs are imported to the wiki by me. So, every day I try to import 1 or 2 howtos and for the last 3 days I have imported 5,6 howtos. Not so great number but after 1,2 week there should be 40-50 howtos.