Re: Wiki madness

On Mit, 2003-01-15 at 13:25, Pito Salas wrote:
> - the formatting is way too weak. You have to learn a strange pidgin html to
> do simple things like bold etc. I am not even sure how you'd get an image
> (e.g. a screenshot) onto an entry

Wikis are intended for an audience that is as general as possible. The
use of a very simple syntax has advantages for new users, but it has
disadvantages for those who are familiar with HTML or another formatting
syntax (such as those used by many discussion forums). Even for them,
however, being able to type

	[http://www.cnn.com CNN]

instead of

	<A HREF="http://www.cnn.com/">CNN</A>

has its advantages, as do the lack of <P></P> tags, the easy internal
linking and so on. Wikipedia supports HTML, too, which is used
especially for tables. In Wikipedia, the image syntax is very similar to
the one used for normal linking:

	[[Image:foo.jpg]]

There are currently several efforts to standardize wikitext syntax. The
UseMod syntax is fairly common and also used by the Linux Documentation
Project to prepare documents which are then converted to DocBook/XML.
Wikipedia's syntax is mostly identical to UseMod.

> - it's hard to comment on stuff. Comments become inline modifications of the
> original material. When multiple people comment you get a total mess. When
> the origninal material is then revised, forget about it!

Usemod-based wikis typically use subpages for discussions. You insert a 

	[[/Talk]]

link in the page, follow it and put the comments on this subpage. A
backlink to the article is automatically put on the subpage. On
Wikipedia, there are several different namespaces: the article namespace
(no prefix), the image namespace (Image:), the meta namespace
(Wikipedia:) and the discussion namespace (Talk:). Any page
automatically gets an associated Talk: page, so if you wanted to talk
about [[Chandler design]], you would follow the link "Discuss this
page", which would automatically lead to [[Talk:Chandler design]].

Talk pages are cleaned up regularly if they get too long. As the
complete history of a page is stored, you can simply remove previous
comments and insert something like

	* Removed all comments: --~~~~

where the ~~~~ will be automatically replaced with your username and
date. Someone who wants to see previous comments can then check the
revision history and view a version preceding that date.

> - when content is created elsewhere (e.g. a graphics or wordprocessing app)
> there's no way to "attach" those documents

On Wikipedia, you can upload any type of file and include it either
inline or link to it. There is also a LaTeX backend; a GNU LilyPond and
SVG backend are being planned. This backend-supported content can be
inserted as text and is rendered on demand (also cached).

> - The ability to control access, as far as I can tell, is fairly minimal.
> Yes you want an open process, but I bet you will want at least a little
> control.

Not necessary. If you ask for access control, you don't understand
wikis. There are a few pages which may need protection against
vandalism, but even here there are alternatives such as FileReplacement:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-January/008537.html

> - And lastly, and most significantly, it's hard to keep up with changes.
> Unread tracking, change notifications, etc are either absent or primitive.

Wikipedia has both a simple and advanced "Recent changes" view, as well
as personal watch lists. You can also view only newly created pages,
chronologically sorted. Read/unread tracking is currently only
implemented for user discussion pages where it makes the most sense --
with hundreds of articles added every week, it's simply impossible to
keep up with *all* changes, plus tracking this for thousands of users
would be quite database-heavy. 

> Yes, it has the benefit of being implemented quickly but IMHO it doesn't at
> all scale for this kind of project. 

Wikipedia as a collaborative writing project is far larger than Chandler
ever will be. See
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AStatistics

Regards,

Erik
-- 
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de

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