Revamping the wiki

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 11:31:52AM +0300, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 09:10:23PM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > And you've just explained why subpages are widely deprecated (Wikipedia,
> > for example, disallows them entirely in the Main namespace): because the
> > point of wikis is the ease of intrawiki linking in writing other pages,
> > as much as it's the ease of creation and recent-change tracking...
> > 
> > and subpages break that entirely.
> 
> Erm?  I can link to Projects/MPX/Status from
> Development/Documentation/InputEventProcessing just fine.

I did say "in writing other pages"

You clipped the case in point example I made, which is that if you use
the addresses of pages in the wiki you have to (in Mediawiki's phrasing)
"pipe-link" *every link you write*.

You can't say "How fast we can procede on this part of the project is
dependent on the [MPX Project Status]"... you have to get the writer
embroiled in a host of twisty little syntax, all different.

That it's twisty -- and these days, that it's *not MW wikitext syntax*
-- are *much* larger roadblocks than I think you think they are to
extensive participation.  The amount of participation on the MythTV
wiki roughly tripled when we went from Moin to MW, for example.

I'm not trying to tell you to switch engines, but I *am* suggesting that
forcing contributors to pay too much attention to your preferred
taxonomy while *they* are writing may turn out not to be optimal for
you.

[Input Event Processing] is unique across your site, is it not?

> > This is why Mediawiki has categories; I don't know what Moin (which is
> > what I think you're using) provides.
> 
> I'd prefer namespacing in the URL, as an organisational thing.  Our last
> wiki grew organically, and look at how well that worked out. ;)

It's always difficult to say with assurance that even though things
aren't bad, they could be better; my assertions here are largely
organic, but they're based on several years working with various wikis,
flavored by some specific study of information taxonomy and user
interfaces.

Take them for what you think they're worth.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra

-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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