When Alex Schroeder wanted to provide a useful resource for Emacs users, he chose to remove the document maintainer bottleneck by deploying a wiki. Blue GNU interviewed Alex to find out how the project has grown.

When and why was Emacs Wiki started?

I started experimenting with a suitable setup in February 2003 and the wiki went online March 2003. We have a bot on #emacs @ freenode that knows the titles of all the wiki pages, so it got really easy to put answers to common questions and code examples on the wiki and point people to the appropriate wiki page. This immediate usefulness when the page count was low motivated me to contribute more once I had started.

I wanted a wiki because I had recently discovered wikis via the WikiWikiWeb (the Portland Pattern Repository founded by Ward Cunnigham) and Meatball Wiki (the wiki on wiki founded by Sunir Shah). I saw that with a wiki we could avoid the document maintainer bottleneck, while sacrificing some quality. The wiki would fill a niche between the Emacs manual (restricted access, slow turnover) and the gnu.emacs.help newsgroup (no access restrictions, ephemeral, prone to endless repetitions).

Where does the project stand at this point (what you've accomplished, have yet to accomplish, interesting activities, etc.)?

At the beginning, a wiki requires a big investment of time and energy by the founder. I estimate that I wrote about a thousand pages on Emacs Wiki before it had enough quality content to turn into a valuable resource for others. Once it was a valuable resource, others started being stakeholders. These days I rarely write anything on the wiki except for welcome messages for new users. That's the great: It has taken a life of its own, like a free software project.

How many active editor currently work on Emacs Wiki?

On the code base: One (me). As for the number of regular wiki editors: I've never bothered to set up metrics for this. What does "regular" mean? What does "editor" mean when logins are not enforced (no passwords)?

Can you give me any idea of how big and/or active the Emacs Wiki user community is?

Not really. How would we measure it? Hits per day? Unique contributors on a given day? Amount of text contributed or changed in a given day?

What are the biggest obstacles the Emacs Wiki team faces?

Zed Shaw once said on his blog: "Right now the Rails folks put everything in a Wiki, which is Hawaiian for 'can't find s***'."

Making pages understandable to newbies, organizing the site map, category pages, improving searches - all the things that improve usability and accessibility are constant challenges.

Is there anything else about Emacs Wiki you think our audience should know?

Emacs is the greatest editor on earth!!111! :)