Wiki War I

hi,

I'm sorry, I sent this twice... hopefully you'll only get it once though, My 
kmail started to like sending email without a from address for a while..  I'm 
hoping/guessing that your mail program blocked my first attempt of sending 
this..



Issues with the wiki as I see them:

backlinks
from what I see, wikipedia does not support backlinks, which means that 
developers must do twice as much work for every update than is neccessary

Navigation
pages must have links to documents that are logically parents, and peers
this type information makes it extremely easy to navigate a site

Density
bulleted lists are not for everything, pages get very long very quickly.  I 
recall hearing of a study that lists scrolling as the number one activity of 
computer users.       I remember my dad telling me that white space is 
cheap..  I have come to the conclusion that it is not cheap, but it is often 
worth the price.   specifically I care about the "see also" and "member of" 
pages

moderator quickness to moderate
moderators should delay before editing a page, perhaps talk to the user while 
the user is online instead of nuking new pages introduced by a member

Main Page
this page needs to start people on their way. it should list the most commonly 
used subset items of a category next to the super category...  i.e., it 
should be like download.com, listing common utilities under utilities.. 
helping to define what is meant

Quantity vs Quality
let there be little pages that have a crumb of information... that  hyperlink 
may be exactly what the user wanted!  who cares about the formatting!!!
if somebody has nothing better to do, then go make the formatting easier to 
navigate/ clearer... don't make it so that the user must scroll through two 
or three pages of screen space to find that crumb.

Save Work
why put stuff into paragraph format if it's already said better elsewhere? why 
hide a hyperlink with a title.. when it just causes the end user a bit more 
work when they want to remember the site?  (you are taking away the ability 
of the user to remember the URL on vis own)  The user is a part of the wiki!


My experience
study of a few natural languages
interest in manufactured languages, and the creation of a content management 
system utilizing branches that can be merged (I independently thought of 
wiki's before I knew what wiki's were, I'm sure a lot of people have...)
a pattern language conference from cpsr.org and a communications club 
(computer professionals for social responsibility)  where I learned about 
wiki's
* www.openwiki.org (defunct) where I wrote a style guide and brainstormed
* wiki.fresco.org   my first attempt at making a dense wiki.  I hate tons of 
comments blocking out content
* www.subverted.net/wakka   This is where I write what I learn relative to 
gentoo.  I have done a LOT of work on this site, and I have refined my wiki 
style
* wiki.linuxquestions.org   This is the first page where I've had to deal with 
other people... I have always been god...   D something or other beat me down 
a bit   (a good thing), and now I come to you all with my tail between my 
legs, offering with my last bit of strength suggestions and advice. regarding 
your epic project.


I have a lot of other thoughts about wiki's
I do not care about spelling, I have better things to do with my time (except  
I can use a spell checker, and I have a rule for checking the spelling of new 
wiki names)

I'm wanting to learn a bit more about the software side of wiki's  I have 
installed a couple wiki's on my machine zwiki,  and some sort of asp wiki, 

I have a goal to make a P2P difference engine that will ultimately make every 
web page a wiki...  it would be a plug-in to a web browser, with a p2p server 
for shaing changes of pages to friends/ subscribers to your oppion

contact info:
[email protected]

ICQ 2302806
yahoo: incinerated-/[email protected]
msn: aaron_pet-hPnnkjYJS9NWk0Htik3J/[email protected]

phone 509 332 7697

snailmail
1220 NE Myrtle St
Pullman WA 99163

I dislike email and wiki discussions