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From: Iain S. <iai...@ya...> - 2000-06-04 07:20:54
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On 2 Jun 00, at 21:40, Cees de Groot wrote: > Reader "A": > > BTW, your JiniWiki site kicks ass -- I'll be hoping to contribute = > >soon. > > Reader "B": > >Arrrggghhh! The WikiWikiWeb site drives me nuts. Actually, that's the same reader! > So we may safely conclude that some like it, and some don't :-) And most are conflicted about it! > Actually, there's nothing in Wiki that /forbids/ a bid of structure. On the C2 Agreed. The freeform nature of the wiki is both its power and its curse. It's wonderful to just throw information into the wiki, and then to just sort of do a Zen-like excursion back through it. You stumble across the most interesting things in a big wiki. On the otherhand, when you know what you're looking for (or at least have a really good idea of what you want), its often really hard to find it in the wiki. Sorta like how you remember the the name of the band that sang that song 2 days after you needed the info while taking a shower. Actually, we've [1] been playing around with some self-forming structure ideas for the wiki lately. Our basic idea right now being that with these "random" webs of linked pages, there are going to be natural data 'centers' and link 'hubs'. Centers are pages that many other pages link to. The more pages that link to the page, the more 'valuable' and 'centered' that page is in the web. It's basically the most valuable resources in the web by virtue of the number of references to it. Automatically identifying and listing important wiki centers will probably 'float' the important documents up where you can easily see them. hubs are pages that have a lot of links to other pages. they act as directories and form something similar to a table of contents for the wiki. once again, by having the wiki itself automatically identify, and list the top 20 hub pages we hope to provide more structure for wiki reading and editing without taking away from its freeform nature. Comments are suggestions are greatly welcome (although this is getting off topic for the jini-users list). I suggest moving it to the sfwiki developers mailing list: sfw...@li... which you can join at sourceforge.net (see url at bottom of email). -iain [1] <digression> I was sort of the wiki clone librarian for a while. Markus ?Peter? (not sure of the last name) wrote a perl clone (JOSWiki) of the C2 Wiki for the JOS project (free java os www.jos.org). He then went on to do other things, and I came on board as the JOS webmaster and inherited the code (minor patches aside I didn't do much with it). Sometime shortly after, Peter Thoeny of takefive.com, grabbed the JosWiki source, improved it for his company intranet and customer knowledge base, then released it as TWiki. I took the new TWiki and used it to replace the old JosWiki. But the perl really frustrated me (performance was poor and leaked errors) so I ported it to PHP (PWiki), the user authentication never got done though and so JOS still runs TWiki. Then Todd Miller (a JOS member) came along, ported (well actually mostly looked at my source then rewrote it) my PWiki to use a MySql database, and is integrating it to work with SourceForge (www.sourceforge.net). It's called sfWiki and is still under construction. You can help out with the new project: https://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=5181 </digression> |