Imported from previous forum
FIXwiki is a wiki that contains much of the FIX specification as well as providing an area for user contributions. It is currently hosted by Cameron Edge at http://www.cameronedge.com/fixwiki/.
However, if the FIX community find it useful and worth pursuing, I am happy to donate it to FPL.
Please take a look at it, use it, and share your opinions. It is completely free.
FIXwiki is a product, so it could be argued that this posting should be to the Product Discussion Forum. But its real relevance is to the whole FIX Q&A process, which is why I decided that it really belongs here.
This Q&A forum has been one of the key elements of the FIX collaborative process since the early days of the protocol. Back then there was no such thing as a wiki but nevertheless FIX has evolved using wiki style collaboration assisted by tools such as this forum.
This forum, along with its search capabilities, is a repository of invaluable information about the interpretation of the FIX specification. It is a natural complement to the FIX specification documents.
For example, if someone is unsure of some aspect of the protocol, maybe the exact meaning and intended use of a particular FIX field value, they would start by consulting the FIX specification documents. If still unsure, they would then typically search postings to this forum using appropriate key words. If still unsure, they would post a question to this forum, which would normally be answered by other members of the community. Once answered, that query and its answer are a matter of record on the forum, which may be useful to others in the future.
This is a model that has served the community well. Some would say “it ain’t broke so don’t fix it”. However, I think that it is worth considering a wiki since that software is well proven and has been specifically designed to support our type of collaborative process.
I am not proposing abandoning this forum. A forum like this is great for discussions and I expect that FIXwiki postings would contain many references to Q&A discussions on this forum. However, I think that a wiki arguably provides a better repository for clarifications, interpretations and examples of the FIX protocol that come out of such discussions.
Going further, a more radical idea might be to consider moving the formal FIX specification itself to a wiki style database – rather than having it in the form of a Word or PDF document. But that is probably another debate.
Anyway – take a look at FIXwiki yourself and see what you think.
A “Using FIXwiki” section has been added to the main page of http://www.cameronedge.com/fixwiki/
[ original email was from John Greenan - john.greenan@alignment-systems.com ]
> A “Using FIXwiki” section has been added to the main page of
JC - have a look at http://stackoverflow.com/
this is a very smart way to combine a discussion forum and a wiki in a way that concentrates knowledge in a useable way.
Hi John
You gave me a bit of a shock there - for a moment I thought you were reporting a “stack overflow” problem on FIXwiki!
Anyway, thanks for drawing our attention to http://stackoverflow.com/. I was not familiar with it. I agree that it is a very neat application of wiki technology to a Q&A forum.
As I mentioned in my original posting, I am certainly not proposing FIXwiki as a replacement for this Q&A forum.
I see FIXwiki as two things - a reference tool for the FIX specification and a repository for user contributions to the specification. I tried to summarize this in the “Using FIXwiki” section on http://cameronedge.com/fixwiki/.
I think the Q&A forum would feed into FIXwiki. Maybe many answers would refer to relevant pages of FIXwiki as part of their response to questions. One of the problems with our current structure is that there is no convenient way to refer to part of the FIX specification other than copying and pasting extracts of the spec into answers.
Similarly, as I mentioned in my original posting, I imagine that FIXwiki pages would refer back to key discussions in this Q&A forum.
The danger with most wikis is that they can become a chaotic mess if there is no overall structure behind them. I imagine that most of us have seen examples of that happening.
With FIXwiki I tried to address this problem by structuring it around the FIX specification itself. See the “Structure of FIXwiki” section on
http://cameronedge.com/fixwiki/.
Thanks for the reference to stackoverflow - I do like it - clever use of technology and a very useful resource for developers.
John
JC - have a look at http://stackoverflow.com/
this is a very smart way to combine a discussion forum and a wiki in a
way that concentrates knowledge in a useable way.
[ original email was from John Greenan - john.greenan@alignment-systems.com ]
“As I mentioned in my original posting, I am certainly not proposing
FIXwiki as a replacement for this Q&A forum.”
Neither am I. I am proposing using the www.stackoverflow.com software as a replacement for this forum system.
Think of it like this - to whom do you listen to and pay attention when they post on here? For sure, if Scott Atwell or Jim Northey post I’ll read it, but FIX_xpert@yahoo.com, well, maybe not.
The www.stackoverflow.com software allows readers to post ratings of answers such that the good answers bubble up to the top, so the signal is split out from the noise and the quality rises to the top…
Just for disclosure, no, I have no financial interest whatsoever in www.stackoverflow.com, I am just a fan of what they have done.
Anyone in FPL land fancy checking this out?
Neither am I. I am proposing using the www.stackoverflow.com software as
a replacement for this forum system.
[ please don’t rank this post, I’ll get a complex 
]
John G,
I, personally, looked at that site when it was mentioned a while back, as well as again this week. I think most would agree that it’s a creative and likely effective. Though, I’m not clear as to ‘how’ you are suggesting the FIX site should be ‘using the www.stackoverflow.com software’. Can you elaborate?
For reference: What Was Stack Overflow Built With? - Stack Overflow
[ original email was from John Greenan - john.greenan@alignment-systems.com ]
Stackoverflow.com is a firm started by a group of developers. The main personality I know of is Joel Spolsky http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ - ex-Microsoft and now runs a software firm called http://www.fogcreek.com/.
I am pretty sure that with the right approach the guys at stackoverflow would be happy to come to an agreement with FPL…
I’ll get in touch with you offline…
Neither am I. I am proposing using the www.stackoverflow.com software
as a replacement for this forum system.[ please don’t rank this post, I’ll get a complex
John G,
I, personally, looked at that site when it was mentioned a while back,
as well as again this week. I think most would agree that it’s a
creative and likely effective. Though, I’m not clear as to ‘how’ you are
suggesting the FIX site should be ‘using the www.stackoverflow.com
software’. Can you elaborate?For reference: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflow-
built-with/
John G
Integrating the stackoverflow.com “stack” would be a bit challenging as the FIX website is on the MSFT platform.
I agree that we have found the current discussion forum somewhat lacking but it does have an excellent search mechanism. I know that not being able to reply from email - whereas most other systems you can - is a limitation.
I was wondering what were the other key features from stackoverflow that you find valuable that we could consider providing:
- Voting
- View unanswered postings (this would be extremely useful for those of us on gtcgov and other committees that are expected to answer discussion posts).
- Tagging
- Summary line on number of responses
- A bit more of a “37 Signals” UI
- Potential integration with FIXWiki
Sorry the current FIX website is on a non-MSFT platform - would require uus to either tool up or use stackoverflow.
John G
Integrating the stackoverflow.com “stack” would be a bit challenging as
the FIX website is on the MSFT platform.I agree that we have found the current discussion forum somewhat lacking
but it does have an excellent search mechanism. I know that not being
able to reply from email - whereas most other systems you can - is a
limitation.I was wondering what were the other key features from stackoverflow that
you find valuable that we could consider providing:
- Voting 2. View unanswered postings (this would be extremely useful
for those of us on gtcgov and other committees that are expected to
answer discussion posts).- Tagging
- Summary line on number of responses
- A bit more of a “37 Signals” UI
- Potential integration with FIXWiki
[ original email was from John Greenan - john.greenan@alignment-systems.com ]
Hey Jim,
The techie part for me is non-challenging, just some more hardware.
The parts I see as useful are all points 1-4 you have listed.
I would suggest that there would be no benefit to having this discussion forum, fixwiki, fiximate, stackoverflowforfix.com and so on.
Centralise in one place - remove duplication and proliferation. Lots of FIX vendors provide web based tools to show FIX specifications - Transacttools used to have a nice one, I am pretty sure b2bits have one and so on.
Maybe one of the commercial vendors that has a microsoft stack would be
willing to host for FPL as a goodwill/community gesture?
John G
Integrating the stackoverflow.com “stack” would be a bit challenging as
the FIX website is on the MSFT platform.I agree that we have found the current discussion forum somewhat lacking
but it does have an excellent search mechanism. I know that not being
able to reply from email - whereas most other systems you can - is a
limitation.I was wondering what were the other key features from stackoverflow that
you find valuable that we could consider providing:
- Voting 2. View unanswered postings (this would be extremely useful
for those of us on gtcgov and other committees that are expected to
answer discussion posts).- Tagging
- Summary line on number of responses
- A bit more of a “37 Signals” UI
- Potential integration with FIXWiki
BTW, I know this is a bit off topic, but www.highscalability.com had a very good writeup of the StackOverflow.com website architecture a couple weeks ago, in case anyone was curious.
Hey Jim,
The techie part for me is non-challenging, just some more hardware.
The parts I see as useful are all points 1-4 you have listed.
I would suggest that there would be no benefit to having this discussion
forum, fixwiki, fiximate, stackoverflowforfix.com and so on.Centralise in one place - remove duplication and proliferation. Lots of
FIX vendors provide web based tools to show FIX specifications -
Transacttools used to have a nice one, I am pretty sure b2bits have one
and so on.Maybe one of the commercial vendors that has a microsoft stack would be
willing to host for FPL as a goodwill/community gesture?John G
Integrating the stackoverflow.com “stack” would be a bit challenging
as the FIX website is on the MSFT platform.I agree that we have found the current discussion forum somewhat
lacking but it does have an excellent search mechanism. I know that
not being able to reply from email - whereas most other systems you
can - is a limitation.I was wondering what were the other key features from stackoverflow
that you find valuable that we could consider providing:
- Voting 2. View unanswered postings (this would be extremely useful
for those of us on gtcgov and other committees that are expected to
answer discussion posts).- Tagging
- Summary line on number of responses
- A bit more of a “37 Signals” UI
- Potential integration with FIXWiki
Include a mechanism (link / button) to report spam which would email the URL of the post to web administrators. When threshold number of users report a post a spam, the post is “suppressed” from view and administrators / forum moderators would be required to review the post and “Mark it NOT Spam” or “Delete Spam” - This safegaurd is required to prevent a “genuine” post from being deleted as spam.
John G
Integrating the stackoverflow.com “stack” would be a bit challenging as
the FIX website is on the MSFT platform.I agree that we have found the current discussion forum somewhat lacking
but it does have an excellent search mechanism. I know that not being
able to reply from email - whereas most other systems you can - is a
limitation.I was wondering what were the other key features from stackoverflow that
you find valuable that we could consider providing:
- Voting 2. View unanswered postings (this would be extremely useful
for those of us on gtcgov and other committees that are expected to
answer discussion posts).- Tagging
- Summary line on number of responses
- A bit more of a “37 Signals” UI
- Potential integration with FIXWiki