On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 08:54:33PM +0000, Philip Hunt wrote:
On 17/01/2008, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com>
wrote:
On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 12:34:34PM -0600, Jason
Spiro wrote:
2008/1/17, Philip Hunt
<cabalamat(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
> I notice you say "Now I wonder in general: why do there need to be
> multiple Wikias? Why can't all articles from all Wikias be one wiki?"
Because you get namespace collisions between the knowledge domains.
Not if the system is properly designed. For example, you could have an
article called "Omaha" in a wicro-wiki about poker, and a
similarly-named article in a micro-wiki about US geography. The links
for these might be:
[[Microwiki:poker/Omaha]]
and [[Microwiki:USA geography/Omaha]]
which resolves the ambiguity.
See above where I said "without making the users have to know a lot of
extra-special sauce to type. That's *way* too high a wall for the
averageuser to crawl over; trust me.
You don't
*want* all wikis to be one.
Indeed not. However, consider a case where someone wants to put up
some information on the web. They can either (i) create a new wiki for
this stuff, (ii) put it on an existing wiki, or (iii) not use a wiki
at all.
Comparing (i) and (ii), (i) is likely to take considerably more effort
than (ii). On includipedia, the process of creating a new micro-wiki
might look something like this:
On an existing page, perhaps the user's user page, a user will edit
the markup by adding
[[Microwiki:foo]]
Then they'll commit the edit and click on the new link. This will put
them into the front page of a new micro-wiki called "foo" which for
now is empty.
They'll add text to this page. Subpages will have links of the form
[[Microwiki:foo/bar]]
The *proper* solution to that is to make the overhead for creating (and
possibly for operating) Mediawiki smaller. If you're going to write
code, that's the code you write. Cause your approach is going to cause
you to end up with a whole bunch of either one-user wikis, or
contributions with links that don't point where you think they ought
to.
It would be nice if there was a way of shortening this
e.g. just using
[[>bar]] and i meaning "bar in the current microwiki". I'm not sure
how easy it would be to do that in MediaWiki (not looked at the code
in detail yet).
Yes, but you haven't justified, to my satisfaction, requiring
contributors to have *any* modified reflexes.
If the information to go up is going to be big and
complex, then
creating a whole new wiki for it is probasbly the best bet. But for
something small, for example a Linux User Group that wants to put up a
few pages about who they are, what they do, and where they meet, a
micro-wiki might be an efficient way of doing it.
Mediawiki Is Not A CMS.
Cheers,
-- jr 'ironic for *me* to be saying that...' a
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates
http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
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