*This message was transferred with a trial version of CommuniGate(tm) Pro* On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Chris Withers wrote:
Ken Manheimer wrote:
Convenient for what? If you've ever tried to support a community through a mailling list, you'll quickly notice that questions, and their corresponding answers, repeat. A lot. The problem is that while maillists are great for keeping people up-to-date on the business of the community, and for disseminating dialogue, they are not so good for building structures - for organizing content so related pieces of a story are appropriately connected.
The counter that this is that Wikis, in my experience (and maybe mine only ;-), are not a good medium for discussions. There's no threading, notfication or subscription, for starters...
Clearly, i agree that the absence of those things in the wiki is a problem - i state that directly in the "problems to be addressed" section! *The* thing to understand here is that we're currently in a position where neither wikis nor maillists, in themselves, provide what we need. We need to do *something* in the meanwhile, if only to bootstrap the process so we can get to the point where we have that integration. (You'd have to ask brian and the dev folk, but i think the reason we're going with wiki is because otherwise all this talk gets **lost** - noone has the time to do the transcribing, etc. At least with wikis you can preserve your thoughts and then email interested parties!) My proposal is all about getting there - i yearn to get the time to do some of what's necessary - at least ZClass-ification so i can do the notification stuff in a clean way, because we're suffering without notification - and i'm hoping there will be a window in not too long. I think this discussion is evidence of the need, not of flaws in the proposal!
Wikis, as they stand, are not bad for organizing stories.
..agreed, but a lot of Wikis are not being used for this. It's a difficult problem. You need a decent medium for discussion, like a mailing list, which needs to automatically (and that seems _very_ hard to me) extract the necessary 'story' bits and store them in a decent story-building medium...
Yes - it seems _much_ easier to me to have people annotate the existing wiki (restricted, perhaps, to only adding text, not changing existing text - that's easy to implement, though we'll have to go to some effort to make it user friendly). From the WikiNG proposal: For discussion, i can see two applications of a wiki document option that allows commentators (non-authors) to only add text, not change existing text. (Zope would diff the new revision and reject it if it contains changes to existing text.) Simplest application would be accepting changes only at the end - weblog style. Next simplest would be one that allows insertions anywhere, for comments next to subject lines. (Zope could offer readers knobs for controlling visibility of annotations.) The document authors could have the privilege of editing any text, to consolidate and refine. Both applications would be useful for different kinds of discussions. Wouldn't that be cool - with notifications to interested parties, perhaps including diffs that showed the annotations, and a bit of context? (A further alluring step would be to allow notification subscription options for getting the entire changed document, and enable the email recipients to add their annotations in standard email-citation style, and send them back to zope, for it to incorporate the edits. But that would take some authentication provisions, as well as better email integration...)
We all sorely miss change notifications and ownership attribution, a preview button, etc - but they're better, even as they currently stand, for building longstanding artifacts than are mailling lists. And hopefully, in not too long, we'll be able to improve them, or provide something else, to do the job right.
Well, the WikiDot idea is starting to crop up in my brain a bit more now ;-) And since that'd be a Swishdot skin, it'd work with the PTK, and everyone's happy and focussed on what they want to be :-)
Well, this is, tangentially, a particularly interesting point for me. I've been challenged with how to fit the WikiNG proposal into the PTK - since the PTK is a prime digital creations content management focus, management doesn't want to dilute resource assignments with other (eg, WikiNG) content-management-oriented efforts. So i have to figure out how it would fit in that frame work - maybe this suggests a way. I'm having trouble fitting my mind around it, though. Sigh. Ken klm@digicool.com