On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 07:59:37PM +0000, Philip Hunt wrote:
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!
Not for the users. And the amount of user interaction over the life of a wiki leaves the labor to set it up at epsilon, or less.
But you're right: using the system should be as easy as possible.
Good to hear we agree that's the goal of Wikis. :-)
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.
See about about optimizing for the wrong thing.
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]].
Sure. But again, why break the common semantics...
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 MediaWiki is to be given extra functionality, users will have to have a way of accessing it. This might involve new syntax. Can you think of a way of doing micro-wikis without extra syntax?
Yes: don't.
The advantages of the mooted 'microwiki' concept continue, to me, not to outweigh the disadvantages, and there are other ways to accomplish what you want which do not have this problem.
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.
On the contrary, Mediawiki is whatever you can coax the software into doing.
"It's not anyone's problem to support you if you try to *use* Mediawiki as a CMS". Is that better? ;-)
BTW, I have a friend whose job involves using wiki software (not MediaWiki AFAIK) as a CMS.
Sure. You can write AI in shellscript. But do you really want to?
Cheers, -- jra