Creation Date 04/24/08

Contents

Introduction and History

As most of you on the Forum Administration Committee are undoubtedly aware, a small group of forum members have been running an experimental forum wiki under the sobriquet, The Bogleheads Wiki. The enterprise was initiated by Barry Barnitz, who, having no access to a server, adopted a free commercial wiki platform provided by pbwiki. When forum members became aware of this experiment, just days after its conception,  the nascent effort became a group undertaking. The effort has been motivated by three main goals:

1. To provide forum members with practical experience in contributing to, organizing, and managing a wiki;

2. To provide a growing core of valuable content which can be transferred to a permanent, forum owned and operated wiki;

3. To provide the Forum Administration Committee with a real world example of how forum members would perform as wiki writers and editors.

The experiment has frankly surpassed the expectations of its members. We feel that a forum owned and operated wiki would be of immense value to forum members and would greatly enhance the value of the diehards.org project,  Thus we formally request that the Forum Administration Committee adopt our proposal to create an official  forum controlled and operated Bogleheads Wiki.

Benefits of a Wiki

Among the benefits that a wiki will add to the current forum are:

• Organization - a wiki makes it easy to organize content into folders; produce tables of contents; indexes; cross-references.  Less time is spent searching reference material.
• Collaboration - articles can be updated and refined over time and checked for accuracy, as opposed to forum threads which have limited editing and are a poor medium for creating reference pages.
• Formatting - more advanced formatting features (fonts, tables etc.) to make articles more appealing and easier to read.
• Reader-friendly - Most visitors would probably have an easier time navigating a website-like reference wiki site than the current discussion board Reference Research Library.
• Permanence - Archived reference material can be readily accessed and referenced for inclusion in forum posts.

Desired Features

The wiki software adopted should naturally be freeware, preferably open source. It would be logical to use a PHP application. Wikipedia contains a relevant article: Comparison of wiki software.

Forum Control

The permanent wiki should be hosted at diehards.org. The current experimental wiki uses a free limited-feature version of commercial software hosted at the vendor (pbwiki) website. This situation is unsatisfactory for the long term, because various unfortunate events may come to pass:

• The Bogleheads Wiki will likely outgrow the limitations imposed by the vendor's free software version.
•  The vendor can decide at any time to charge for the currently free product.
•  The vendor's website may disappear, e.g., if the company goes bankrupt.
• The vendor might add advertising to hosted Wikis.

Ease Of Operation

Simplicity of use for the adopted software is important in encouraging broad participation by forum members. However, this desire is somewhat less important than the actual hosting of wiki freeware on diehards.org. More technically inclined Bogleheads should, in any case, write detailed instructions to enable everyone to contribute painlessly. Through experience, the members of the test Wiki have found the following features to be especially valuable for a financially oriented Wiki.

Linking Capability

Hyperlinking, both internally and externally, is a fundamental wiki requirement.  We strongly suspect any recognized wiki software platform will support hyperlinking. Its ease of use will vary among platforms, but difficulties can be mitigated through well-written instructions. 

Charts and Tables 

As this link from our Wiki indicates, charts and tables are an important component of a financial wiki. Capabilities are sure to vary among the software products in this category. At the very least, one can presumably make the chart or table in an external application, convert it to an image, upload it, and embed it in the desired wiki article. 

Images

We strongly suspect any recognized wiki software supports embedding of images. The value of the capabilty to produce images can be illustrated by this Wiki page. [Once again, difficulties can be mitigated through well-written instructions.] 

Revisions

We need the ability to see previous revisions, revert to a previous revision and, preferably, to be able to see what has changed in each revision so that moderators/contributors can more easily monitor changes.

Operational Features 

Membership

While the general public should have access to reading the wiki, writing and editorial privileges should be restricted to forum members. At least three levels of participation are needed:

•  Administrators - Just one or two individuals require absolute control over the wiki.
•  Moderators/Librarians/Editors - Only a few trusted individuals should receive this designation. These highly privileged users can delete files permanently and perform other unrecoverable actions. They should also have the power to organize the wiki pages. We may also need Reviewers who monitor changes and check for accuracy; these individuals do not require moderator privileges.
• Writers - All forum members without adverse history who request permission should be accepted into this role. Writers can contribute new articles and edit existing ones. However, it's important to note that malevolent writers can't do any lasting harm on most wiki platforms. If a writer goes renegade and damages pages, an editor (or another writer) can just revert them back to a previous version. This reversion process is quite simple, generally involving only a couple of mouse clicks. The renegade will also have his writer's privilege immediately revoked.

We feel that the simple requirement of having members request authorization for participating in the wiki is an elegant, subtle, and simple means of exercising a proper degree of management control. The forum imposes a modest time period delay on posting links for newly enrolled members, and we feel a similar modest delay should apply to authorizing wiki privileges for new forum enrollees.  One should note that among the present membership only about 7% of the 7,000+ forum members have made 50 or more posts on the forum (and even fewer have contributed to the Forum Reference Library). Thus, requests for Wiki participation are likely to come mainly from the core group of regular forum posters, and number in the tens and hundreds as opposed to thousands. Many Wiki sign-ups are apt to prove lurkers and, perhaps, Readers.  In our very limited test wiki sample we have had six contributing wiki writers out of 12 authorized writer signups.

Subforums

All wiki members will need access to a private subforum to collaborate on articles and discuss related issues. This is essential for handling "how-to" questions and building the collaborative process which is at the heart of a functioning wiki.  Administrators, editors, and monitors should be authorized to use the current Librarians Lounge for discussing administrative and monitoring matters.

Copyright Issues

To avoid licensing confusion and reinforce the spirit of the Bogleheads forum, a clearly marked copyleft arrangement would seem appropriate. From the Wikipedia article on copyleft,

Copyleft is a form of licensing and may be used to modify copyrights for works such as computer software, documents, music, and art. In general, copyright law allows an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the author's work. In contrast, an author may, through a copyleft licensing scheme, give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme.

Copylefting the Bogleheads Wiki would prevent an author, for example, from including wiki articles in a book and then copyrighting the book. The widely used GNU Free Documentation License is a good copyleft option.

Links For the Committee

A wiki keeps a record of all edits to pages. Thus, in providing the Forum Administration Committee with a link to our test Wiki, we provide a complete record of member conduct for the open scrutiny of the Committee's judgment. Each page history records edits from the wiki membership. We encourage the Committee to examine page content as well, realizing that some pages are in developmental status.

The Bogleheads Wiki

We also created a forum for our test wiki participants to facilitate discussion of  wiki issues and to collaborate on postings. We provide a link to this forum for the Committee's consideration.

The Bogleheads Wiki Forum

Close

In tendering this request, we realize that the Forum Administration Committee will have many questions. We humbly suggest that it might prove fruitful to create a temporary hidden forum for discussion of issues. Should you deem such a forum useful, we would request that you allow the handful of major contributors 'to The Bogleheads Wiki to have access to this discussion forum. We will provide you with the names if you wish to vet them.

Among our test wiki members, as well as among regular forum participants, the most frequently mentioned open source freeware Wiki platform is mediawiki, the platform used by wikipedia. We provide the following links for Alex and Larry, which we hope will be helpful:

Comparison of Wiki Farms

Manual: MediaWiki Features

WikiMatrix: MediaWiki