Re: [Phpwiki-talk] idle thoughts ...

[Steve W. <sw...@pa...>]

Hi Adam, thanks for the thoughtful post...

On Fri, 6 Apr 2001, Adam Shand wrote:

> one of the things i've been looking around for and thinking about is
> integrating a wiki into a weblog.  though there has been a reasonable
> amount of talk about this the closest i've seen is drupals book module
> (which is brand spanking new).
>
> http://www.drop.org/module.php?mod=book

Neat! I've looked at kuro5hin before but didn't realize the users rate all
articles and that's how they bubble up to the top. Drupal looks to me
mostly like a PHP implementation of the Scoop system.

> i'm curious about two things.
>
> has any thought been given to making phpwiki work as a php-nuke module (or
> better imho a drupal module?).  i honestly have no idea what would be
> involved in this.

This has been suggested many times, but I don't see any interest from the
project developers, nor myself. It's not that I think it's a bad idea,
it's just not an itch I have to scratch :-)

The problem I see though is: look at c2.com's Wiki. It's as simple as can
be. There's something easy to understand when all of the page content can
be edited by the user.

When the Wiki is just a smaller part of a larger system, it tends to be a
small section of the page you can edit. Since so very few people know or
understand the Wiki concept, it will probably suffer from lack of user
participation. That's my opinion at least.

>
> second thing i think would be easy, but one of the tacks i'm thinking
> about is using standard weblog rdf features available in a wiki.  what
> would it take to make an rdf version of (for example) the RecentChanges
> page so that a weblog could include it as a slashbox?

In the newer code base I suspect it won't be all that hard, since
RecentChanges is now machine-generated and not user-editable. (If I read
Jeff's CVS comments correctly).

However all of this gave me several thoughts (which is what makes playing
with hypertext systems so fun!), one of which is: why not make the weblog
in reverse? Instead of users posting new entries to the weblog, let the
weblog be generated by user edits to pages. The WorseIsBetter
implementation of this would be a list of page diffs, but with a little
thinking this can be made more informative.

> basically what i want to do (this is still a very unfinished idea so bear
> with me :-) is have a weblog front end but use a wiki as a back end data
> store.  the problem with weblogs is that once a story is a couple weeks
> old (sometimes just a couple days old) it's pretty much dead.  wouldn't it
> be cool if information could be moved from a weblog (where discussion
> happens better then on a wiki) into a wiki where the thoughts can be
> maintained and refined over time.

I've had similar thoughts for some time now...


> if you're curious rusty of k5 put up some interesting thoughts on meatball
> wiki a while ago:
>
> http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiLog

In particular I thought this implementation was interesting:

http://pikie.darktech.org/cgi/pikie?DevelopmentWebLog

~swain


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