At 2004-02-29 04:22, Edward S. Peschko wrote:

I wanted to run my own wiki, and had a couple of questions that I would greatly appreciate being answered (or getting pointers to the right direction for answers)

I want to make a wiki, but I want to enforce some constraints on it.. First, I want the wiki to be in a generic hierarchy such that the hierarchy follows certaion administrator-defined rules - ie:

   a) its a hierarchy with three levels
   b) linking between levels is limited to certain places inside the web page.

Ultimately, what I'm looking for is an interface between wiki and CVS - I'd like the pages to be gathered from mysql and dumped into source control in corresponding directories (this would fit my application very well). And, ultimately to go the other way, to take stuff out of CVS and put it onto the wiki.

I wouldn't mind writing the glue code to do this.. but I'd rather not write an entire new wiki in order to do it.. ;-(

In other words, I'm hoping that this isn't a wheel that have to reinvent. I'm really interested in using wiki as a collaboriative tool, but I'm not sure if it fits the more rigorous model that I have in mind.. If it doesn't, what do people suggest as alternatives?

Why not start with describing your actual problem instead of a solution that you think will solve your problem? Often newbie designers think in solutions rather than problems. First define your problem, then search for the best solution.

But let's suppose your problem and solution analysis was correctly done:

I don't think a strict hierarchy is possible in an encyclopedia, because for example cows can be put under: mammals, animals that butchers slaughter and animals that eat grass. Finding the one single best hierarchical systems sounds like what intellectuals in the 19'th century wasted their time on.

The real world is much more complicated and for example pre-computer library systems worked this way: Each new book got an ever increasing number and based on that number several indexes (boxes with small index-cards) were set-up based on book title, author and sometimes some sort of hierarchical system.

And why would you like to use CVS instead of the mechanism in Wikipedia itself? I'm sure that the usage of CVS and Wikipedia differs enough that different systems are called for. The Wikipedia source code is developed using CVS, so it's not that the programmers don't know that system.

ps - what's the difference between wiki and its various clones particularly phpwiki?

Interesting question, but probably very complex to answer.

Is there a wiki coded in perl?

Yes, there is. But why use Perl when you can use PHP?

Greetings, Jaap