Hi all...I'd like a bit of advice. I've now got a test version of my "Disinfopedia" running at the following URL:
http://www.prwatch.org/wiki/phpwiki/newcodebase/wiki.phtml
If you want to play around with it, feel free to enter any text you'd like. (This version is purely for experimentation; once I've got everything figured out and modified the way I want, I'll erase the dummy version entirely and do a second install at a different URL.)
My test version is currently identical to Wikipedia, except that I've changed all instances of the word "Wikipedia" to "Disinfopedia" and created my own logo. Also, I've added a line of code to the bottomLinks function in "Skin.php", so that the bottom links now include a section saying:
INFORMATION RELATED TO [page title]: People | Organizations | Activities | Funders | Issues ... etc.
Right now the hyperlinks associated with this section are non-functioning dummy links, but I want to add code so they will take people to related pages on each of these topics. I'd like it to function similarly to the "Discuss this page" link. For example, if I had an article about an organization called "APCO," the "People" link could take people to the following URL:
http://www.prwatch.org/wiki/phpwiki/newcodebase/wiki.phtml?title=People:APCO
If, however, the page doesn't yet exist, the hyperlink would be:
http://www.prwatch.org/wiki/phpwiki/newcodebase/wiki.phtml?title=People:APCO...
So here are my questions:
(1) Should I have separate namespaces for "people," "organizations," "activity," etc.? If so, I'd have to add code to the $wgNamespaceNamesEn array in "Language.php". I think I'd also have to revise "Namespace.php" and create some new functions in "Skin.php". Where else would I have to modify code? (I'd like to make as few modifications as possible so that as future revisions are made to the Wikipedia code, I can incorporate them with a minimum of pain.
(2) Should I also have separate "talk" namespaces for each of the new category namespaces I'm creating (e.g., "people_talk," "organizations_talk")?
(3) If I don't create separate namespaces, is there some other recommended way of getting the functionality I want?
Whoa,
now that's a surprise -- a guy whose work I like to reference on Wikipedia and elsewhere shows up on, of all places, the Wikipedia tech mailing list. Welcome, Sheldon, and thanks for your excellent work with John Stauber on exposing the corporate PR machinery.
I've often wanted to have more online material of yours that I could point people to, and perhaps Disinfopedia can become that. Of course, I would also appreciate it if you could contribute info, when you find the time, to the "real" Wikipedia. Have you thought about the license you want to use for your project yet? It's hard to operate a wiki under traditional copyright, and more beneficial to society not to.
As for your namespace links: It's possible - I would try to reduce the number of topical namespaces to 3 or 4 to avoid ambigiousness ("where do I need to go to get information X? case studies? issues? hmm .."). Also, try to think about good names. People:George W. Bush? Is that a page about George Bush or a page with links to people related to George Bush? (IMHO only the latter makes sense, as the page about George Bush should not have its own namespace, but this is not intuitively clear.)
You will probably also get some redundancy and occasionally irrelevant links, but that's probably acceptable. Make clever use of redirects to avoid redundancy. I recommend creating Talk namespaces for every namespace -- if pages are not large enough to discuss them separately, it makes no sense to separate them in the first place.
One other way to get the functionality would be to implement HTML anchors in wiki syntax. That way you could link to [[George W. Bush#people]] to get to the specific article section. You could also implement page templates to get a default structure for articles.
On Wikipedia, we have tried to avoid too mechanical categorization schemes, and so far that works well, too - you just have to structure your site consistently. Linking is easy on a wiki. With "What links here" and "Related changes" you can easily get more context for a specific page.
Let me know if you decide to implement the namespace idea and I can hopefully provide some more detailed recommendations.
All best,
Erik
PS: "Toxic Sludge is Good for You" should really be available as a GNU FDL e-book. We need to get this book into schools :-)
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