"Philip Hunt" cabalamat@googlemail.com wrote in message news:823293b50801221159t8bd4ee5ic10deea870cd9896@mail.gmail.com...
On 22/01/2008, Jay R. Ashworth
jra@baylink.com wrote:
On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 08:54:33PM +0000, Philip Hunt wrote:
On 17/01/2008, Jay R. Ashworth
jra@baylink.com wrote:
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.
It's however a smaller wall than setting up an entirely new wiki!
But you're right: using the system should be as easy as possible.
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.
The *proper* solution to that is to make the overhead for creating (and possibly for operating) Mediawiki smaller.
Setting up a new wiki is always likely to involve complication. For a start, one needs access to a webserver, which typically costs money and takes time to set up. Adding pages to an existing wiki is always going to be a simpler solution than creating a new wiki and then adding pages to it.
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.
I agree the last problem is one I need to seriously think about. One possible solution might be that within [[Microwiki:foo]], [[bar]] points to [[Microwiki:foo/bar]] and that if I want to point to bar in the main namespace I have to say something like [[:bar]].
This is something that could be handled using namespaces.
The additional features required in the software would be: * Namespace manager built into MediaWiki. AFAIK this has been done but never comitted to trunk? What happened to that code? Any chance of getting it into the core software? * Ability to specify for a namespace whether links without a namespace prefix resolve to (a) the default namespace or (b) the current namespace.
Therefore workflow would be as follows:
To start a new 'microwiki' go into the namespace manager, and add a new namespace with an appropriate (unique) name. The manager should automatically add the associated talk namespace too. You will need to set 'Destination of links with no namespace specified' to 'same namespace' instead of 'default namespace', but otherwise the defaults should be OK. Might be nice to have a simple interface for users and a fuller interface for sysadmins (as I know the existing code has a load of other options that may not be relevant in a lot of cases). Might also be nice to have a link to the 'Main page' of the new namespace that allows you to start using it straight away.
To use the new 'microwiki' go to a page in that namespace and start typing. Links work exactly as if you were in the main namespace of a new wiki.
To link to another microwiki, specify the full namespace. Therefore if you are on the page [[Poker:Flush]] to link to [[Poker:Omaha]] you would simply need to use [[Omaha]], but to link to the geography page you would need to use [[USA Geography:Omaha]].
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)