Ken Manheimer wrote:
I don't think anyone disagrees that wiki pages as they stand are imperfect for discussions. I strongly feel (with lots of experience) that mailling lists are also flawed, sorta complementarily, for getting definite results out of discussions. Both work with some effort, i think many of us feel that a insightful hybrid could reap more than the benefits of both.
Yup, spot on :-)
The Wikis on the dev.zope site do a bit of this with delegating discussion to a discussion page.
Yes, but that's only advisory, it's not enforced...
What's your point?
Not point, just a comment ;-) As long as this as recognised it's not so bad...
We discussed (in a off-list discussion) a point of karls, that the tracker and weblog can map onto eachother, with some structural provisions. I can see something very similar with wikis.
Yup, hence WikiDot, for me to work on...
A weblog could constitute a wiki space, with the topic message being the FrontPage and the threads hanging off of it being nested wiki pages. The discussion pages would automatically get names, per their nesting status - LogSub1Sub2 or something, overridable by the page author to have semantic significance.
The names aren't so important to me but I think I see where you're going... I'm keen to have the structure of replies actually be a storage structure, unlike in traditional Wiki. This makes WikiName markup more difficult to handle, unfortunately...
- Wiki organizational features - table-of-contents view, ability to adjust nesting situation in the discussion (modulo the weblogs policy - often the owner may disallow any such adjustment, but in some cases it would make sense).
Good point.
- With WikiNG's prospective notification mechanism, people could "subscribe" to email notifications for any changes - additions, edits, etc - within threads/subthreads, or just for additions at top levels of threads. The latter is like "executive summary" monitoring, wanting to know only when the uppermost parts of the discussions change, without having to worry about changes to the outlying parts of the discussion tree.
Swishdot is going to have this stuff pluggable, so WikiDot could have something to match this...
- With WikiNG editing policy control, the weblog *could* have a policy that allows authors to amend their messages - eg, to insert or append comments to their existing messages. Or to edit their messages, if that fits the task at hand. (Eg, if what they're doing is collaboratively developing a document.) The basic case would not allow this, for more classic, conventional weblog conduct.
Another good point...
Lots of good stuff. The essential thing in this perspective is seeing the weblog as a structured viewing mode for the contents of the wiki -
yup...
These are the kinds of things i'm hoping to get at with WikiNG - a smart content widget, with two essential features - good impedence matching to authoring structured, linked content (structured text plus wiki refs),
A lot of people I know would disagree with the Structured Text bit, but I guess it'll have to do for now. Wysiwig editing on the web hasn't arrived yet :-(
and intrinsically determined and easily adjustable organization.
'Easily adjustable' could be difficult... cheers, Chris