The Fortran Wiki was put online in October 2008 by Jason Blevins and its content is under the GNU Free Documentation License (except source codes in the Public domain, unless otherwise noted).
A few thoughts
My feeling is that this wiki is underused by the community. The page Recently Revised in Fortran Wiki shows that only a few members of our community are editing it. And yet, it is a simple tool that the community could easily take advantage:
the Fortran-lang.org site is a great place to publish peer-reviewed well structured documentation and tutorials, via GitHub,
the Fortran Discourse is a great place to have very interesting discussions and learn a lot, but as it is growing it becomes less easy to find a specific information,
the Fortran Wiki is a great place and a very simple tool to collectively accumulate knowledge about Fortran, and quickly (editing a page takes no longer than posting in the Discourse).
How to edit
No account needed, you just have to click on the “Edit” link at the bottom left of the page, modify it (follow the Markdown syntax resumed in the right margin), enter your pseudonym and submit. You can even use the default Anonymous Coward pseudonym! But it is a better practice to use a pseudo, and it gives you the possibility to create a wiki page to present yourself, if you want.
If you don’t know where to start, go to the All Pages list, click on an interesting one and review it: does it need to be updated? Can you improve it yourself? You will also find on the same page a list of Wanted Pages.
A few ideas
We could define a list of Wiki pages that need to be updated in priority.
We could define a list of Wiki pages that should be created.
I use the wiki mainly for the function documentation. And I frequently tell others to do so. I think it would be nice to add the missing functions.
Additionally, I didn’t find any pages explaining statements like print and read.
And I would like to see pages like “Loops”, “Branching” etc.
After my course I am giving right now for the next two weeks, I can go through my course material and try to add some more pages to the wiki.
I have also identified a problem concerning mathematical formulas in the Wiki. The page HowTo says “math on the Fortran Wiki is written using itex, a dialect of LaTeX designed for generating MathML for use on the web”. But it does not seem to work (tested with Firefox and Chromium under Linux). See for example that page: Bessel function in Fortran Wiki
Here a wild idea: Wouldn’t it be worth it for the fortran-lang page to host the fortran wiki? I think this could redirect the focus and both pages would benefit, the wiki to get a bit refurbished and fortran-lang more traffic by hosting the wiki within …
And when looking at this empty space in the bottom-right corner:
I have tried to contact Jason Blevins several times to see if we can collaborate, but unsuccessfully (no reply). I do not recommend using the wiki if we cannot contact the maintainer. If it comes down, there is nothing we can do to fix it. If anyone of you are able to contact him, please let me know. It would be good to meet and collaborate.
On the homepage, there is an Export link at the top right: the content of the Wiki can be exported in HTML or more interestingly in Markdown. There are 645 files (2.9 Mio uncompressed).
I could backup the content once in a while, or even write a small script to do it automatically regularly based on such a command:
Assuming that we get there, a problem would be the redundancies with the rest of the Fortran-lang site. For example, around one third of the pages of the Wiki are about Fortran intrinsics, and we already have a very good tool with Fortran Intrinsics — Fortran Programming Language
For sure! In case the idea gets some momentum (and that it is practically feasible) it would imply a non negligible amount of revision in order to catch redundancy and also bringing together the styles.
It might be done in a progressive manner by including the wiki “as is” and then evolve the content incrementally. Or a pre-revision should be done before integration (?) … just some food-for-thoughts.
The feeling I had is that fortran-lang has the strength to become the flagship for “most-things-Fortran” and a/the wiki makes sense as being part of it.
@vmagnin, thanks for raising awareness about the Fortran Wiki, and especially for your excellent updates recently. I agree with your view of the wiki as a low-friction repository to collect information about Fortran. Indeed, anyone can edit/update any page on the wiki by simply clicking the Edit button at the bottom of a page. Importantly, there are no accounts and it is not necessary to use Git, go through review, etc.
@certik and @milancurcic, thanks for contacting me. As I recall it was back in early 2020 when things were not going so well. I appreciate all of your many contributions to Fortran. Although I don’t have the spare bandwidth for Fortran or my open source projects these days as I did back in 2008, I have managed to keep the wiki running, free of spam, and to make periodic updates.
I don’t think anyone should feel reluctant to contribute to the wiki merely because it is not under the fortran-lang.org domain or in the same repository. The original mission statement of the wiki was to be an open community resource that anyone can contribute to and where nothing would be locked in. As @vmagnin mentioned above, the content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (like the GFortran documentation) and can be copied by anyone provided that it or any modifications are redistributed under the same license. Anyone can also export the entire contents of the wiki in a zip file at any time by clicking the Export button at the top. So I hope anyone will feel free to update anything on the wiki and to contribute new things such as useful code snippets, links, history, or any other ideas.
Thanks for pointing this out. The issue with the math on that page is that all of the backslashes (\) are escaped (\\). I have fixed that page. Indeed, the wiki supports LaTeX, SVG diagrams, and a syntax highlighting of Fortran source code.
There was an issue a year or so ago involving an unexpected database system change after a Linux distribution upgrade. If there are similar issues on other pages, I suspect it could be due to some quoting that happened when converting the database.
Thanks @jblevins for having created that reference Wiki, and for continuing the maintenance! It is good for the community to know that you are still maintaining it, because a perennial site is important (and evermore in the Fortran world and its decades long history ).
Thanks for the help. I downloaded the source and used grep to find them. I didn’t think about using the search! By far the most entertaining page to fix was @urbanjost’s roach program
pseudonym! But it is a better practice to use a pseudo, and it gives you the possibility to create a wiki page to present yourself, if you want.
).