Benjamin Scott wrote:
On Sep 28 at 2:54pm, Bruce Dawson wrote:
The only real problem I see is: Maintaining the conventions of a flat
namespace.
Why do we need a convention for that?
All I can say is "you'll see". The real answer is a question: "And why
do you find hierarchical name spaces convenient?" :-)
A bit of explanation: Having a "flat wiki" implies that a naming
convention be followed for link names. For instance: SummerSummit2005
could just as rationally be Summer2005Summit, or even
Summit2005Summer. Which should it be?
Whatever you feel like. Links and searches will get people there.
Unfortunately, human nature tends towards being lazy, so this quickly
degrades into "Whatever I feel like", and "whatever you feel like", and
"whatever they feel like", and ... because people will chose a name that
makes sense to them and not necessarily the community.
Of course, having no structural conventions ensures that no one will
ever be successful at refactoring the web (or any part of it). Well, not
without a herculean effort. So we won't have to worry about any hurt
feelings/egos.
How can the convention be enforced without a lot of time-consuming
refactoring of the entire web?
Any conventions we might have don't need to be enforced, for the same
reasons. Should someone want to clean up things, the software makes it
easy to do.
How will people feel when their pages are suddenly refactored and
they can no longer find evidence to the point they are trying to assert?
I don't know how they will feel. TWiki maintains a nice revision
history, so nothing should be "lost". Beyond that, what people feel is
really their problem, not ours. :-)
Ah. You have rhinoceros hide ;-)
The external link problem is about the only thing that really worries
me. It sucks to have someone link into OurFooBar only to find it
renamed to FooBar in the name of reductionism. But honestly, web links
tend to break like spiderwebs anyway, so I'm not sure we're really
making that much of a difference. I honestly don't think name churn is
going to be *that* big a problem for GNHLUG. And we can always use the
TWiki Redirect plug-in to help that problem (like Wikipedia does with
their redirections).
Name churn is always a problem for the maintainer of the web site (you
did volunteer to be the webmaster!?) If we start adding meeting minutes,
presentations, ideas, projects, ... then name churn will start occurring
much more than it is now.
Well, maybe we can change the 4xx (nonexistent page) error to point to a
search page?
I agree with the above. Having different webs is a "semantic crutch"
until some better technique comes up. There are two alternatives that
I can think of:
* Naming conventions for links (that I mentioned above).
* Having a some specialized TWiki code that automatically creates
pages and their links. An example from another site I set up:
I'm a little confused as to why we need code to create pages and links
for us. Most of the time, any topic page should already be linked to
by at least one other page. If that somehow fails, the search function
should find whatever got lost. If *that* somehow fails, I imagine it
should be easy enough to have TWiki list "orphaned" pages for us. For
that matter, I imagine someone else has already done this. :)
[blob of code deleted]
Ask me to demo this at the Autumnal meeting if you don't understand
the above.
I'm afraid I don't. I would welcome the demonstration. Despite all the
experience I have with our wiki, I don't actually know that much about
TWiki.
It implements a "work-flow" - something that is frequently repeated, but
the mechanism does most of the templating and overhead for you. Some
(unimplemented) workflows on the existing web are: moving future events
to past events, adding future events, ...
I'll demonstrate something I put together for another company. Or you
can search for "workflow" at TWiki.org. That's where I got the idea
from, and it really helps.
Speaking of busy pages, should I turn on the "Release Edit Lock"
feature so that pages won't be locked for an hour after someone has
editted it? I've already bumped into it several times.
Yah, me too. I'm thinking having that release-edit-lock check box
default to on would be better.
I changed the setting in TWiki.TWikiPreferences to default to on.
One can always turn it off if one is doing multiple edits. Maybe
reduce the timeout to something like 20 minutes, too?
OK. I changed that to 20 minutes too (in lib/TWiki.cfg).
--Bruce
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