"Philip Hunt" <cabalamat(a)googlemail.com> wrote in
message news:823293b50801221159t8bd4ee5ic10deea870cd9896@mail.gmail.com...
On 22/01/2008, Jay R. Ashworth
<jra(a)baylink.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 08:54:33PM +0000, Philip
Hunt wrote:
> > On 17/01/2008, Jay R. Ashworth
<jra(a)baylink.com> wrote:
Because you
get namespace collisions between the knowledge domains.
Not if the system is properly designed. For example, you could have an
article called "Omaha" in a wicro-wiki about poker, and a
similarly-named article in a micro-wiki about US geography. The links
for these might be:
[[Microwiki:poker/Omaha]]
and [[Microwiki:USA geography/Omaha]]
which resolves the ambiguity.
See above where I said "without making the users have to know a lot of
extra-special sauce to type. That's *way* too high a wall for the
averageuser to crawl over; trust me.
It's however a smaller wall than setting up an entirely new wiki!
But you're right: using the system should be as easy as possible.
You don't *want* all wikis to be one.
Indeed not. However, consider a case where someone wants to put up
some information on the web. They can either (i) create a new wiki for
this stuff, (ii) put it on an existing wiki, or (iii) not use a wiki
at all.
The *proper* solution to that is to make the overhead for creating (and
possibly for operating) Mediawiki smaller.
Setting up a new wiki is always likely to involve complication. For a
start, one needs access to a webserver, which typically costs money
and takes time to set up. Adding pages to an existing wiki is always
going to be a simpler solution than creating a new wiki and then
adding pages to it.
> If you're going to write
> code, that's the code you write. Cause your approach is going to cause
you to end up
with a whole bunch of either one-user wikis, or
contributions with links that don't point where you think they ought
to.
I agree the last problem is one I need to seriously think about. One
possible solution might be that within [[Microwiki:foo]], [[bar]]
points to [[Microwiki:foo/bar]] and that if I want to point to bar in
the main namespace I have to say something like [[:bar]].
This is something that could be handled using namespaces.
The additional features required in the software would be:
* Namespace manager built into MediaWiki. AFAIK this has been done but
never comitted to trunk? What happened to that code? Any chance of getting
it into the core software?
* Ability to specify for a namespace whether links without a namespace
prefix resolve to (a) the default namespace or (b) the current namespace.
Therefore workflow would be as follows:
To start a new 'microwiki' go into the namespace manager, and add a new
namespace with an appropriate (unique) name. The manager should
automatically add the associated talk namespace too. You will need to set
'Destination of links with no namespace specified' to 'same namespace'
instead of 'default namespace', but otherwise the defaults should be OK.
Might be nice to have a simple interface for users and a fuller interface
for sysadmins (as I know the existing code has a load of other options that
may not be relevant in a lot of cases). Might also be nice to have a link
to the 'Main page' of the new namespace that allows you to start using it
straight away.
To use the new 'microwiki' go to a page in that namespace and start typing.
Links work exactly as if you were in the main namespace of a new wiki.
To link to another microwiki, specify the full namespace. Therefore if you
are on the page [[Poker:Flush]] to link to [[Poker:Omaha]] you would simply
need to use [[Omaha]], but to link to the geography page you would need to
use [[USA Geography:Omaha]].
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)