[Zope-dev] I feel your Wiki Pain ;-)

[Toby Dickenson]

> | 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
> 
> and from the WikiNG proposal:
> 
>        For more elaborate editorial and commentary annotations, i can
>        see layered documents, using mixin objects that provide a
>        tailored view on other or contained objects.  The mixin would
>        be a layer by which annotations are associated with text
>        passages in the rendered subject document, like "the crit
>        system":http://crit.org does for arbitrary web pages.
> 
>        Overall, document authors could use a particular annotation
>        structure according to their needs.  Eg, discussion objects for
>        points which can be discussed, or brief editorial passages to
>        give feedback, and author checkmarks for when they've satisfied
>        or refute the suggestions, etc.
> 
> Annotation is a spiffy kind of threading.

I dont actually have anything against Wikis in general; I have used on very
successfully for what I would describe as "document refinement", and a
better annotation scheme will enhance that use of Wikis.

The passage you quoted uses terms like "subject document", and at the moment
I dont see that as the best model for a *debate*

> | 2. No personal replies. On several occasions I would have liked to
> 
> From WikiNG:
> 
>        - Attribution of changes for tracking
> 
> With attribution, you can identify and could respond directly to the
> author of a particular passage.  It's useful for more, of course.

Cool, I missed that one.

> | 3. No update notification. The one time I was update to 
>
> | 4. Hard to keep track of many Wikis: Each wiki has its own 'whats
> 
> The ability to subscribe for notification (above) and/or to track what
> you personally have seen, and not, is intended for this kind of thing.
 
It would keep me happy if the notification includes a link to the new
content (rather than a link to the page that contains new content). Even
better, the email notification could *include* the new content.

> | 6. Too easy to miss the creation of a Wiki. On several occasions
> 
> My plans for notification subscriptions would be hierarchical, and
> enable you to subscribe to events like creations of new wikis 
> within a 
> hierarchy - so if you subscribe at the top of the wiki space, 
> you find 
> out about any new wikis, while if you subscribe within the developer's
> part of the space, you learn about new developers wikis.  Etc.  (This
> was not covered in the WikiNG proposal - i was trying to avoid
> including too many details, and failed miserably anyway...-)

Im happy.
 
> | 9. I never get the structured text quoting of python source right
> | first time.
> 
> The only quoting you need to know is example::
> 
>   The two colons after the word "example" indicate that this 
> contained 
>   block is all quoted.

Ill remember that. Your proposed new attribution scheme would help too.
 
> As i said in my last reply (but after you posted this, so you couldn't
> have taken it into account), mailling lists as they stand don't work
> for establishing growing structures. 

But Wikis don't (for me, today) work for loosely structured commentry.
Quoting from http://dev.zope.org/Fishbowl/Introduction.html

>In some cases a mailing list will be setup for substantive,
>large-scale projects. Otherwise existing mailing lists can
>be leveraged (for now, use zope-dev for this).

Perhaps I should rephrase my objection..... The *real* problem is that this
isnt happening - discussion is stored in Wiki pages like
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/XxxxDiscussion