Patrick Phalen <zope@teleo.net>

[Michael Simcich, on Fri, 21 Apr 2000] :: What's neat about Wikis, to me at least, is that they offer us a communal :: scratch-pad which is dead simple to work with. It's really trippy to be able :: to contribute spontaneously to a website, and to intermingle your own :: thoughts with those of others. <snip> :: It does have limitations that bug me sometimes. Nevertheless I think it's a :: great invention, and one that will probably spawn variants that are just as :: interesting. Could happen here in fact! ZWiki is utterly simple to set up, :: thanks to Simon and DC, and eminently tweakable.

[I don't know if it's appropriate to continue the crossposting that began this thread. Maybe continued discussion should be moved to zdp?]

Anyway, Michael speaks about tweaking or forming variants of ZWiki, which is akin to something I've been thinking about the past few days.

There is a common need among open source and open standards communities (including Zope) to evolve discussions from loose and unstructured to something finally more formalized and ordered (e.g., specifications, documentation, etc.). The difference with the Zope community is that we actually have tools which could be adapted to that purpose.

Wikis provide one model for the loose first stage (Usenet and threaded mailing list archives provide another). In a way, they overlay a brainstorming model onto the network model. They permit fleeting thoughts to be "captured in a bottle." The problem is how then to migrate from the loose to the structured, once the discussion has run its course and it's time to organize the material and publish something formal (documentation, for example).

Of course this can be accomplished by someone laboriously combing through the Wiki or the archive and hand-assembling something, but it would be nice to have tools or hooks to automate the process.

Generators have been used in past to create FAQs from discussion lists, but they tend to require a lot of human intervention and they still end up being too linear.

Cognitively, homo sapiens aren't equipped with much bandwidth for complexity; they rely on media to aid them. Wikis eventually evolve into complex representations of information with no abstract or overview representation. What Wikis do well is capturing freeform, brainstorming-style discussion. Thereafter, it would be beneficial to have different representations of the information they contain, perhaps including a tree or outline view. How else can you see the whole picture and organize it into something more useful?

The Interfaces Wiki is an example. I imagine Michel Pelletier would be happy, when the time comes to turn the ideas in the Interfaces Wiki into real documentation, to be able to see the whole Wiki in a linear or hierarchical view.

I don't know how ZWiki is implemented, but if it were XML at a granular level, then maybe it could be parsable into different presentation formats.

Or maybe there is some other tool available which already addresses this. E.g., there is wonderful application program called "Inspiration" (Win/Mac) which allows a user to bring up a graphical view and add boxes containing concepts (text and/or images), and then freely interconnect the boxes arbitrarily with lines to form a "concept map." Then, one mouse click can turn that into a collapsible/expandable outline view.

Bottom line: is there a way to parse a Wiki and generate an outline view?

Classic Wiki's internal representation is pure freeform text, using a very simple markup: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TextFormattingRules ZWiki is a Python product, stored also as freeform text. It can actally support "classic" markup, as well as "plain" text and "straight" HTML, but almost all the ZWiki instances out there have suppressed all formats except StructuredText. A great deal of the appeal of WikiWiki is its simplicity, and its reliance on "social engineering" (read "conventions") rather than hard-coded mechanisms, to achieve community goals. For instance, it is possible to leverage WikiSimplicity to add additional structure to a wiki: one creates a "topic" page (e.g., 'TopicFoo'), and then adds references to it on all pages associated with that topic. The "backlinks" for the page then give you all the references to the related pages. I think changes to wiki to make parsing simpler are likely to damage WikiNature; I would be willing to be convinced otherwise, however. Tres. -- ========================================================= Tres Seaver tseaver@digicool.com tseaver@palladion.com