I was playing with Wikipedia this evening and became aware of the following issues:
1. If Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia, then it probably is not appropriate to have threaded discussions on a subject page. See for example AlTruism, where one person gives a flame bait description of the concept, and numerous people then argue back about that description. If a discussion is approptiate, perhaps there should be a standard discussion page, as AltruismDiscussion or AltruismDebate, that is linked to from the subject page.
2. Often the wiki links for noun and adjective forms of a word should point to the same subject page. For example, SkI and SkiinG are essentially overlapping concepts. We could say, on the SkI page, "To engage in SkiinG". This is not elegant, but it works, I suppose. I see on the WhichWikiShouldWeUse page that there are different versions of wiki that might allow for different ways of linking. Do one of these alternative ways offer a solution to this problem, allowing for different links to point to the same subject page?
Tim
On Sat, 27 Jan 2001, Timothy Shell wrote:
I was playing with Wikipedia this evening and became aware of the following issues:
- If Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia, then it probably is not
appropriate to have threaded discussions on a subject page. See for example AlTruism, where one person gives a flame bait description of the concept, and numerous people then argue back about that description. If a discussion is approptiate, perhaps there should be a standard discussion page, as AltruismDiscussion or AltruismDebate, that is linked to from the subject page.
I disagree; in fact I think it is healthy that there is discussion on subject pages, and a normal thing that will arise naturally when a subject is written with inappropriate amounts of bias. Once the discussion has achieved concensus (this can take a non-trivial amount of time), someone will be compelled to go back and summarize up the discussion. The resulting subject, IMHO, will be much the stronger for the discussion, because it will account for multiple viewpoints.
If it helps, imagine a bunch of old professors sitting around a library table discussing one of the esteemed fella's submissions to the encyclopedia. If you've ever heard professors discuss their areas of passion with one another, you'll know that it can be anything but gentlemanly at times. ;-)
Anyway, I believe it will be self-correcting. This is part of the reason wiki's work so well. I don't think any rules need to be made. If you think too much discussion has gone on, perhaps consider appending a note exhorting the participants to wrap it up and summarize? Or if you feel ambitious go ahead and summarize it for them.
- Often the wiki links for noun and adjective forms of a word should
point to the same subject page. For example, SkI and SkiinG are essentially overlapping concepts. We could say, on the SkI page, "To engage in SkiinG". This is not elegant, but it works, I suppose. I see on the WhichWikiShouldWeUse page that there are different versions of wiki that might allow for different ways of linking. Do one of these alternative ways offer a solution to this problem, allowing for different links to point to the same subject page?
I've had similar concerns wrt ist and ism. E.g., Communist and Communism. I don't have a good solution for within this particular wiki.
And yes, other wiki's have capabilities that help here, but there's usually a trade-off in the form of having to construct the links a tad more deliberately than you'd like... I would wager there is in fact some way to kludge around it in this one...
Bryce
Hello to all of my fellow WikiPedia fanatics! :-)
I'm the author of the UseModWiki software currently running the WikiPedia. While I was skeptical at first, I think the wiki approach could work very well for a collaborative encyclopedia. I've decided to focus most of my near-term efforts on new features and supporting tools for WikiPedia (most of which will also help the other UseModWiki sites).
If any of the readers of this list have any questions about the wiki software, I'd be glad to try to answer them. My "permanent" email address is caadams@usemod.com, but this frontiernet.net address should work for awhile (I'm not planning on moving).
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I've done a lot of thinking about WikiLinking recently, and I'm not sure that the WikiName (capital letters) convention is a good fit for the encyclopedia. The AccidentalLinking is a nice feature, but it has a price in harder-to-read links and confusing conventions.
For instance, when I recently wanted to link to "democracy", I first did a search to see if someone else had linked the name (I thought someone might have already used "DemoCracy"). I found that nobody else had linked that name, so I made the link "DemocracY" (to follow the new convention of last-letter-capitalized). In short, it took me far more time to make that link than it would have to just type [[democracy]]. Someone unfamiliar with the local wiki conventions might guess otherwise on another page and link to a separate "DemoCracy" or even "DeMocracy". Ick.
To make a longish story short, I added code (about 150 new lines of Perl) to my development copy to allow (site-optional) "Free" linking within [[double brackets]]. You can use spaces, numbers, commas, dashes, and the period character in these kinds of links. Valid link names include [[George W. Bush]], [[China-Soviet Relations]], [[Physics]], [[music]], and [[Year 2000 bug]]. User names can also use these new links. Internally and within URLs the spaces are replaced with _ (underline) characters, which are translated back to spaces for display purposes.
Visit http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/um9.pl?FreeLinks to see these links in a live wiki, and feel free to edit pages to try it out. (Note that this is a test/development wiki, and is sometimes unavailable when I'm developing. I will soon (a few days at most) make a more stable version available to the public.)
Tomorrow I will start working on a semi-automatic conversion tool which should allow the entire WikiPedia to be converted in a couple hours.
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[SkI vs. SkIing, etc.] Do one of these alternative ways offer a solution to this problem, allowing for different links to point to the same subject page?
I've had similar concerns wrt ist and ism. E.g., Communist and Communism. I don't have a good solution for within this particular wiki.
And yes, other wiki's have capabilities that help here, but there's usually a trade-off in the form of having to construct the links a tad more deliberately than you'd like... I would wager there is in fact some way to kludge around it in this one...
That would be a good wager--there is already a "redirect" feature made for this circumstance. To use the page-redirect feature, simply type
#REDIRECT NewPageName
...at the beginning of the page you want to redirect. (The command must start at the first character of the first line of the page. REDIRECT must be in FULL CAPS.) For example, to make "CommunIst" redirect to "CommunIsm", you would edit the CommunIst page and add:
#REDIRECT CommunIsm
to the top of the page. You can see this feature in action at http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/um9.pl?CommunIst (you will be redirected to the CommunIsm page).
You can use this feature right now on the current WikiPedia site. Yes, I'm aware of the SubOptimal state of the current wiki DocumentatioN. :-)
--Cliff
Hi Cliff,
Wow! Thanks for doing all this for us. The changes you're making are very groovy.
This will handily remove name ambiguities due to differing placements of the second capital letter. We'll still have to deal with the problem of different names for closely-related concepts (e.g., "communism" and "communist"), but the redirection feature seems to take care of that pretty well...
A great feature would be something that would instantaneously, automatically, rename both a page and all the links to it.
Larry
On Sat, 27 Jan 2001, Clifford Adams wrote:
Hello to all of my fellow WikiPedia fanatics! :-) I'm the author of the UseModWiki software currently running the WikiPedia.While I was skeptical at first, I think the wiki approach could work very well for a collaborative encyclopedia. I've decided to focus most of my near-term efforts on new features and supporting tools for WikiPedia (most of which will also help the other UseModWiki sites).
If any of the readers of this list have any questions about the wikisoftware, I'd be glad to try to answer them. My "permanent" email address is caadams@usemod.com, but this frontiernet.net address should work for awhile (I'm not planning on moving).
Well, since we've got the ear of a this wiki's maintainer, I'll withdraw my suggestion to change to TWiki. Instead, I'll describe some things I liked about other wiki's I've used...
* In other wiki's, I've seen *bold* and _italic_ done that way, rather than using multiple single-quotes. I dare say I prefer it that way, but it appears that <b>this</b> and <i>this</i> seem to work, so that's ok.
* We definitely need some way to distinguish headers. I've been making them bold, but that's not really enough to distinguish between different levels of headers.
* We really need an upload functionality, so that we can easily submit images for the site. So far, I've just been including src links pointing to places on another server.
* We may wish to consider allowing having multiple "zones" for wiki material. I.e., separate the wiki-related material from the encyclopedia-related material. It might also make sense to set up special areas focused to a particular topic that is going to have a LOT of entries. For instance, under PopMusic, it appears we're going to have entries for all the pop musicians, which suggests having a sub-encyclopedia just for music artists might be warranted. I'm unsure on this one though, so take it as a loose suggestion.
* If I have a document that is in HTML already, is there a simpler way to put it into the site, than to have to manually strip out the HTML and put the wiki tags in it? For instance, the topic on the Photo Electric effect had so much HTML in it that I didn't know where to start to clean it up; it looks like a mess right now...
* Another note is that the Photo Electric effect article is in German. How do we feel about multilingualism? What is the policy - to accept alternate languages / translations, or to only accept english articles? I know this opens a can of worms, but...
Btw, with all of these suggestions, I wouldn't be surprised if they already exist - if so, then change the suggestions into "would be nice to add mention-of to the website".
Timothy Shell wrote:
- If Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia, then it probably is not
appropriate to have threaded discussions on a subject page. See for example AlTruism, where one person gives a flame bait description of the concept, and numerous people then argue back about that description. If a discussion is approptiate, perhaps there should be a standard discussion page, as AltruismDiscussion or AltruismDebate, that is linked to from the subject page.
There is already a cultural tradition in the wiki world called "refactoring". The idea is that there is a "discussion mode" and a "document mode". In discussion mode, people have a threaded discussion, with many different issues being raised.
Then, some WikiMaster comes through after the discussion has died down, and "refactors" the page. This involves editing/rewriting/ rearranging, so that all points of view are presented fairly.
- Often the wiki links for noun and adjective forms of a word should
point to the same subject page. For example, SkI and SkiinG are essentially overlapping concepts. We could say, on the SkI page, "To engage in SkiinG". This is not elegant, but it works, I suppose. I see on the WhichWikiShouldWeUse page that there are different versions of wiki that might allow for different ways of linking. Do one of these alternative ways offer a solution to this problem, allowing for different links to point to the same subject page?
I don't think there is any automated solution to this and similar problems.
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