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

[Martijn Faassen]

Toby Dickenson wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Sep 2000 11:27:33 -0400 (EDT), Ken Manheimer
> <klm@digicool.com> wrote:
> 
> >(Not sure that will scale, but creating new lists for each proposal
> >definitely won't scale.
> 
> I dont see this as a problem: You only create a new list when the
> traffic for that proposal gets too great for zope-dev. Threading is
> good enough before that point.
> 
> You cant do that with todays Wikis, which need to capture the whole
> discussion right from the beginning (IMO)
[snip] 

I think you could integrate both mailinglists and wikis. On the one
hand, often we'd like to preserve a good posting in a mailing list as
a wiki page. So we make a separate wiki@zope.org address that's subscribed
to the mailing list, that keeps listening to the list and sees things
like this in postings:

Wiki:StructuredTextWiki:FooBarPage

This is a bunch of text that should be added to FooBarPage.

Wiki:end

Or I see you posted something interesting, and *I* think it should be
on the list:

Wiki:StructuredTextWiki:FooBarPage

> Something very interesting you wrote

Wiki:end

It should strip off the quotes automatically in such a case.

Some care should be taken so that replies don't add the same text to the
wiki *again*.

Anyway, so that's the mailinglist to wiki gateway. Now the wiki to
mailinglist gateway.

There's a very interesting discussion going on about ZFoobar on 
the MetaSyntaxWiki. So, someone presses the 'make this page into a
discussion list' button, and the following happens:

  * A new mailinglist is created (with some name the user could fill in)

  * the wiki page is posted to the mailing list as the first message
    (perhaps after some editing)

  * if there is a notification system, the existence of the mailinglist is
    announced (ideally to all people who posted on that page).

  * the mailinglist is also listed in some central list somewhere on
    the Zope site.

As people post interesting things to the mailing list, the wiki can
be informed by the mechanism I described above.

There should also be a rule for the list to be shut down as soon as 
the discussion has died down (no postings for a while, etc).

I hope these ideas contribute to the discussion. I too find it harder
to keep track of wikis than of a mailing list, and editing structured text
in textareas through the web is not very unpleasant. I keep tripping up
over structured text rules as well.

(that gives me an idea that is fairly simple to implement: wiki@zope.org is
an address you can mail to directly as well, and whatever you write
is added to the wiki page you indicate; we get to use our own editors,
parts can be forwarded from the list, and so on)

Regards,

Martijn