What GitHub has going for it is that it is familiar to ("a majority of"?) working developers, and that it's better than both the competition and the Git CLI itself, but from a reality-adjusted perspective, GitHub is pretty bad, too. (Then when people like me make comments like this, others wrongly infer that it comes from a history of false starts and firsthand frustration, unable to conceive that anyone would speak up on this sort of thing if there weren't something personal at stake; no way that it could just be the result of empathy for the uninitiated.)
It's pretty tragic that we've basically killed wikis —like, actual wikis—and regressed back to directories of text files managed by version control systems originally meant for handling program source code. That people then go on to call these wikis is basically an insult to history.
Interestingly, Microsoft has a product called TFS that has a great wiki implementation: it's native markdown (with github enhancements), a decent in-browser editor/viewer, and it's backed by git. Plus it has some nice features that let you refer to people with the at-symbol (@) and work items (bugs, tasks, stories, features, etc) with a hash symbol (#), and some other stuff. Github itself has some of these features; I'm not aware of anything else like it (Tiddlywiki, ignoring it's unusual runtime, may be the closest that I'm aware of).
I disagree. I think TFS is an abortion geared around project managers with dev features bolted on. The wiki is ok if you’ve never used other products and their optimizations require an understanding of TFS’ project management suite. I’ve never been able to teach non-TFSers how to use the wiki who don’t commit to learning TFS.
Yes, TFS is overall a survelleince produce for managers. However, that has nothing to do with the wiki implementation included with it, which is quite good. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I found it hard to use for the primary goal of a wiki: allow contributors to contribute. Wikis need diverse SMEs and it was hard to get SMEs to understand how it worked well enough to contribute and edit content, much less organize. Was able to do this with confluence, mediawiki, and tons of other wiki sites
The unwillingness to venture into territory that would make the previous claims quantifiable (and falsifiable) is noteworthy.
$ sha256sum "./PR?-ORLY.txt"
52028d35999a481e7cb19b14eae3bf66cb7c9c4fe2e15b56b55f3ccadffeee1f ./PR?-ORLY.txt
$ cat "./PR?-ORLY.txt"
Did you commit to source control and submit a pull request to post this comment?
What GitHub has going for it is that it is familiar to ("a majority of"?) working developers, and that it's better than both the competition and the Git CLI itself, but from a reality-adjusted perspective, GitHub is pretty bad, too. (Then when people like me make comments like this, others wrongly infer that it comes from a history of false starts and firsthand frustration, unable to conceive that anyone would speak up on this sort of thing if there weren't something personal at stake; no way that it could just be the result of empathy for the uninitiated.)
It's pretty tragic that we've basically killed wikis —like, actual wikis—and regressed back to directories of text files managed by version control systems originally meant for handling program source code. That people then go on to call these wikis is basically an insult to history.
52028d35999a481e7cb19b14eae3bf66cb7c9c4fe2e15b56b55f3ccadffeee1f