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

[Adam S. <la...@sp...>]

> 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 :-)

honestly i'm not that interested in it either (i don't like phpnuke), i
just figured it would have been requested and was curious about thoughts
:)

> 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.

to a certain extent i agree, it took me a long time to wrap my head around
wiki's ... which is kinda of baffling in retrospect because they are *so*
simple.

> 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.

what i was thinking of was a little more structured, and not really a true
wiki.  probably only people with a certain amount of karma (basically a
time investment to discourage random destruction) would be able to be
editors.

> 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.

it would require very careful page editing, or rules to determine what
appeared in the weblog or you'd get a really dull weblog (today adam fixed
the spelling of "maintainence" ... again! :-).

maybe if you made a very heirarchical wiki then you could have things
appear when you create a new node?  so your wiki might look like:

section politics:
  sub-section copywrite:
    sub-section napster vs. riaa
      story today XXX happened
        discussion ...
in that model everytime a new story page was created something would
appear in the weblog.  or if a section or a sub-section was edited
significatly (which has to be judged somehow) it would be reposted.

this way you have your persistant data store built in.  and then you have
another wiki which basically acts as a glossary and allows miscelaneous
bits of information to be filled in in more true wiki style.

what i'm struggling with is how to inforce the heirarchy.  do you do it
with some form of sub-wiki's or do you somehow backend a weblog with a
wiki?

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

i'm not much of a coder (i hack :) but i've got a server with cycles to
spare and a t1.  wanna help :)

> In particular I thought this implementation was interesting:
> http://pikie.darktech.org/cgi/pikie?DevelopmentWebLog

yep i'm watching it pretty closely, it's still *very* simple at the moment
but it's pretty cool.  once there's some way of having true discussion
assiciated (better then ThreadMode) with it we're getting closer.

adam.

ps. sorry this is really pretty off topic but i think it's interesting so
hopefully others will too.