Toby Dickenson wrote:
http://www.zope.org/WikiCentral/FrontPage lists most Zope Wikis. Does anyone else find Wikis to be far less convenient than a good old mailing list?
Each has their ups and downs :-S
1. No threading. On several occasions I have made comments in a Wiki that were subsequently ignored - I guess because they got lost in the mass of other edits. Recently people have been adding edits to the end of the page: This makes it easier to keep track of changes, but harder to catch up on a discussion when you come to it for the first time.
...and there's still the problem of finding out who made what changes to what. I thought 2.2's history-isms would help here?
2. No personal replies. On several occasions I would have liked to email a comment personally to another contributer, but they didnt leave an email address.
That's a tough one though, isn't it?
3. No update notification. The one time I was update to keep up with a Wiki discussion involved the other participant always manually emailing a change notification.
Yeah, that's not _that_ hard to do, and I wish it'd be done a long time ago :-S
4. Hard to keep track of many Wikis: Each wiki has its own 'whats changed' page, but even those are too coarse.
Yeah, that is a tough one too :-S
5. Too easy to fragment a discussion. On several occasions I have thought that a discussion had dried up, only to find out later on that it had moved to another page.
...that's just bad use of Wiki, although sadly, that's qutie easy to do...
8. Editing is painful. I have to use the browsers text field, and the whole Wiki page has to make a round trip with every change.
What about FTP? I'm pretty sure you can do it into zope.org although I can never remember the port number :-S
9. I never get the structured text quoting of python source right first time.
DTML is _that_ much worse too :S < and RSI anyone? ;-)
10. There are too many empty pages, because someone has clicked on a ? next to word that happened to be a WikiName. Useful pages lie hidden behind a sea of links to empty pages.
Yeah, this also makes the RecentChanges page kindof useless too :-S Okay, here's an idea which people may or may not like: How about running the 'Discussion' parts of (in particular) dev.zope.org from ZDiscussions, ZUBB or Squishdot? These products are designed for discussion and are better at it than a Wiki. Speaking for Squishdot, you get a lot of notifcation (not as much as I'd like, wait for Swishdot for that ;-) and threading, and it's even got Stuctured Text support now. <end of advert ;-)> I dunno about other people, but I've given up on dev.zope.org simply because I cannot track the changes without having to put in a disproportionate amount of work. This has meant that a lot of proposals which could help with things that I really hate about Zope (DTML, lack of ability to 'hide' methods like standard_html_footer from URL access, lack of groups in Zope security) I haven't had the opportunity to comment on in a useful way (yes, yes, no comments about my views being useful ;-) way. end of Rant II ;-) Chris