On 17/01/2008, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 12:34:34PM -0600, Jason Spiro wrote:
2008/1/17, Philip Hunt cabalamat@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.
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]]
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).
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.