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March 16, 2005
Wiki People
Wiki people need to lose the mysticism and fanaticism.
A Wiki/Blog is a really good idea. Unfortunately, no one quite seems to know how to implement it, because in a Wiki, everything HasAStupidName, and in a blog, everything is uniquely identified by the time it was posted. There also don’t seem to be good mechanisms for dealing with comments, since it would be wacky to provide both “Edit This Page” and “Comment on This.”
MoinMoin, through extensive use of ACLs and a few small plugins, can be made to do more-or-less what you want. You can create a BlogPage template, adhere to a naming convention, and use a fancy macro to build the main page. Then you create a /Comments page for each BlogPage and assign it a more liberal ACL that allows other twats to edit the page. But then, you run into a small problem, which is that they need to know enough Wiki Markup to actually fill in the comment page. And they need to know enough not to delete other people’s shit. Or you need to watch the comments page and unfuck it when they fuck it. My experience with offering Textile on my comment portion seems to be that nobody really uses it, not even the few people who actually use my blog and comment on it rather than on the pale image that’s broadcast to LJ.
Alex wants to know who needs this kind of power. I’m not sure I have an answer for that. I think the Clan page would be cooler if Clan people had the ability to post blog entries (or News Items or whatever) and others could comment. But it would have to be a cross-posting system, because nobody would really post just to that, instead of their LiveJournal.
Who knows?
I’m ill. I don’t know why or what it is, other than feeling lousy. I hope I’m better tomorrow, because I probably shouldn’t take any time off. That said, Michael would let me stay home if I had to, but I’d rather not have to.
I tried to install blojsom for work. It’s hard to install, and out of the box, it looks really lousy too. I didn’t even mention it to Michael yet.
That’s about all for now.
Posted by FusionGyro at March 16, 2005 08:52 PM
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Comments
Okay, I’ll try some textile and see if it actually comes out on your blog ;-)
my foo heading.I setup MoinMoin+Subversion for my group at work and a wiki/blog seems to be the most common misconception/requested feature. I promote wiki’s because they are dead simple to use, but in order to use a wiki well requires some learning and practice. And wiki’s are certainly not suited for encoding every type of information possible (blogs are a good example). However, I would go as far as saying that (with practice) a wiki is like an external memory source that can be immediately used by my brain. Everytime I learn something, I choose an appropriate page name and then I write what I learned in a page of that name.
I’ve re-written some groups of pages in my wiki up to 3 or 4 times and discovered a few things. One: it is important that pages be short. If a page is too long, then it should be split up. Two: page names need to be appropriate. If I want to know about a particular subject, then I expect to find a page named after than subject. This can include the violation of the StupidPageName convention. For example, I recently created a page titled “Architecture” which contains hyperlinks to pages about architecture. Sometimes, especially for weird or ambiguous page names, I prefix them with some sort of qualifier such as “Sound/sfront” or “Sound/MP4-SA”. MoinMoin handles this prefixing similarly to a hierarchial file system. The StupidPageName convention is a good fall back, but sometimes it it is best violated. Third: using a consistent style is important to for rapid assimilation of information in pages. At the very top of my pages I usually have a “see also” section to link to other wiki pages. Then I have a table of contents. Then I have a section (called “Links”) for hyperlinks to other websites. Then I add other sections as appropriate. Fourth: use redirects. If I find that to get to a subject and find that I usually type in the wrong keyword to get there, then I simply make a page that contains that keyword and I put a hyperlink inside of it to get me where I want to go.
A set of pages prefixed with “PackagingSoftware/” have been fairly useful to me. These contain notes about languages (C, Python), build systems (SCons), and package systems (ebuild). For example, if I forget how to encode run-time library search paths into a C program, then I can just look at “PackagingSoftware/C” and expect to find relevant information. And if that information doesn’t exist, then I do a google search and import my discoveries into the wiki. If I want to remember how the heck to achieve a DESTDIR effect with SCons, then I have a well defined place where I can keep track of such information.
But, I agree with you on the wiki/blog thing. Making a modern wiki do blog basically destroys the major benefit of wikis (in my opinion): simplicity/ease of use. I’ve been trying to come up with some non-sucky (generalized) scheme to interlink wikis, blogs, a calendar, and a papers database. But, I haven’t discovered the tao yet.
Posted by: David Baird at March 18, 2005 06:34 PM
Okay, I’m being unusually philosophical now. Here’s a thought: wikis cover space whereas blogs cover time. Wiki’s are great for covering information that doesn’t have to be cast into a timeline, but blogs (or better: a mailing list) can let you reconstruct a series of events as they lead to a conclusion. Here’s something that neither a wiki nor blog would do: what if you want to encode a segment of history, say the Napoleanic wars and other events that occurred at the same time. A wiki doesn’t provide enough dimensions (namely, time) to effectively encode this information. Blogs and mailing lists are concerned with journaling events as they happen. So what would need to be done to encode the Napoleanic wars in a manner that could be represented in a hyperlinked medium with timelines/calendars, maps, and other good stuff? Or how about the evolution of U.S. Code? For instance, we might want to track the state of U.S.C. as it has ever existed, but we also might want to relate that to events that occurred in Congress and around the world. And then, we might also want to relate that with more examples from history (e.g. to check if we’re committing actions that have occurred repetitively in history). History is good because it is subject to interpretation, and thus can benefit from a wiki-ish / emailing list-ish sort of model where people’s various ideas are recorded.
Posted by: David Baird at March 18, 2005 07:00 PM
Baird,
I’m going to email you about these topics separately. I seem to have three bugs in my blog:
- I’m not getting emails about comments
- Textile didn’t work for you, but it did work for me (in this message).
- Previewing doesn’t show you what’s actually going to happen. I’m not sure what I can do about that.
Hmm. What to do?
Posted by: Daniel at March 19, 2005 09:53 PM