[sfWiki-devel] Re: WikiWeb [was Re: How does JavaSpaces actually work?]

[Iain S. <iai...@ya...>]

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>