subscribe
« I am not a stealth-geek | Home | Plus Ça Change… »
EngaTiki Project Online
By Jay Savage | May 18, 2005
Well, I’ve finally decided to stop tinkering with [EngaTiki](http://www.engatiki.org/engatiki/EngaTiki) (for the moment) and go live with it. It still has a few kinks, but it’s pretty usable and I think it’s time to start letting people get a look at it. at least I have the permission issues worked out, although it meant scrapping the entire project and dropping [TWiki](http://www.twiki.org) in favor of a young php and css-driven project called [Wikka](http://wikka.jsnx.com/). Since I don’t php nearly as well as I know Perl, and I barely know css at all, it’s been an uphill battle. But I’m pretty pleased with the reults, at least as interim results. Hopefully someone with a little more css experience will get involved eventually.
For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, EngaTiki is a project I’ve been trying to put together for a while. In fact, it’s the reason I registered this domain in the first place. The goal is to create the worlds largest annotated bibliography/review site in literature and the humanities, kind of like [WikiPedia](http://www.wikipedia.org) for scholars.
And so, without further ado, I present:
> [http://www.engatiki.org/engatiki/](http://www.engatiki.org/engatiki/)
Topics: blog, engatiki, tech |
May 23rd, 2005 at 3:48 pm
Jay,
Why limit it to lierature and the humanities? I can see a great value in this for all areas of learning including business and the sciences. Why not have a larger goal for EngaTiki?
Just as on-line courses and systems are looking to incorporate wikipedia as the on-line reference, EngaTiki could eventually be the defacto bibliography/review site for all fields, and therfore havea greater use as a reference service/tool for educationa as a whole.
May 23rd, 2005 at 4:24 pm
David,
This thought has certainly crossed our minds, and who knows what the future holds? It was conceived as a companion to the MLA bibliorgaphy, though, and English Ph.D. students are going to be where the initial input comes from; if it comes from anywhere.
In the short term anyway, we’re dealing with severely limited human and physical resources. Checking in and managing the FAQ, getting the css and other things that *are* going to break under load, and when people start trying to do things with wierd encodings, etc., are going to eat into everything we have. Beyond that, Wikka is pretty flimsy, and we’re going to need something more robust quickly, which probably means writing it ourselves. In all that, I need to feel like the subject matter, at least, is something I have a handle on, or at least something where I know people who have a handle on it.
In a year or two, again I say, “who knows?”. I do believe, though, in the basic unix design principle that each project should do one thing and do it well, and that you build larger projects by stringing smaller ones together. So if we get this right, we may move on to something more, and then something more after that.
If everything goes according to plan, I won’t even have to worry about it; the users will carry the project where they want it to go.
March 11th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
[…] almost two years, I’m taking the EngaTiki project offline. it was a nice idea, but it never caught on, except among spammers, and I don’t have […]