Re: Wiki (mis)use

On Wednesday 06 April 2005 03:32 pm, J.M. Maurer wrote:
> 2 little things that are a maintenance ''nightmare'' (it's not that bad
> at all, but then you know what i mean :-) :

I'm guilty in both cases, but I'd like to explain why I put those there, then
we can perhaps decide whether they are appropriate or not. I'll start with
the second first:

> * Also there is a contributers sections on a lot of pages. While this in
> some cases is useful (for example a link to a particular mail in the
> archives), just such as notes as
>
> * DomLachowicz - 07 Mar 2003
> * RandyKramer - 07 Mar 2003
> * Francis James Franklin - 07 Mar 2003 (emails to the list)
> * Marc Maurer - 09 Mar 2003 (email to the list)
> * GilbertMark - 17 Sep 2003
> * BirchKnutson - 03 Mar 2005

This is intended as a way of giving attribution or credit for contributions to
the page.

Note that:

   * It is readable without going through all the RCS revisions (one at a time
for a non-admin user). If a person doesn't want their name to appear there,
they don't have to put it there.
   * Some of the contributors (e.g., those marked "emails to the list") will
not be seen in the RCS revisions because (typically) someone else (often me)
has taken their email and added it either verbatim or paraphrased. (I
sometimes make a judgement call as to whether to give "credit" if I
paraphrase an email (or something else) but I try to err on the side of
giving credit.
   * We currently have an occasional (and hopefully temporary and to be
resolved) problem of RCS failing to record a revision. The contribution
section doesn't necessarily solve that problem, but sometimes helps. (Aside:

On twiki.org (hosted on sourceforge), the problem occurs when there is
insufficient temporary space on the RCS working disk/directory (there are
other causes, but that seems to be the common recurring cause). Marc
investigated the last occurrence at abisource and found what appears to be a
permissions problem.

Description of the problem: somebody makes a revision and saves their work,
and RCS seems to record the revision history. Sometime later, someone else
comes along and makes additional changes. RCS loses the record of the first
changes, and records a revision (same number as previous revision) which
attributes both sets of changes to the last editor.

> * On some pages a Revision History is manually maintained. This A)
> clutters the page B) is unneeded as wiki is versioned already. Please
> remove them if you find them (unless someone objects with a good reason,
> which i doubt exists :-)

(Hmm, I'll try to make this as short as possible ;-)

TWiki (and many/most wikis) have a feature called RecentChanges (on TWiki,
WebChanges). The intent is to allow interested people to view the page and
see which other pages have been changed recently. Some wikis just list the
page name, TWiki (and some others) try to provide some (hopefully useful)
text from that page.

The way TWiki does that for the version of TWiki installed at abisource is by
displaying the first ~162 characters of the page. Since that version of
TWiki some changes have been made to allow designation of the summary to be
displayed (i.e, instead of the first ~162 characters). (I'm not 100% sure
that change is actually incorporated in twiki, a plugin, or still under
discussion.)

In addition, I would like to see (on pages like WebChanges) not only something
to identify the content of the page, but something to identify what has
changed. (New versions of TWiki support that partway by allowing named
sections on the page, thus there can be sections labeled "Summary" and "Last
Revision". To my knowledge, a named section "Last Revision" has not been
incorporated in any version of TWiki so far, but I started that section in
anticipation of such a change.

The way I anticipate most people reading the TWiki (searching Google or using
a TWiki search for information on a particular topic/question), I don't
expect too many wiki junkies to be watching that page for changes (and trying
to identify the change from the WebChanges page).

On the other hand: If we start getting wiki graffiti (or worse), that
(non-existent) feature could be useful--presumably those creating such
graffiti would not bother to put a change description there.

On the other hand: since TWiki does (almost) require authentication, maybe we
won't see much graffiti.

(BTW, both of the sections we're talking about are near the bottom of the
page, where many people will learn to ignore them if they are not of
interest.)

Anyway, that's the background.

If they significantly detract from the usefulness of the site for the users of
abiword, they can be deleted. (As, Marc suggests, people edit the pages.)

regards,
Randy Kramer
Received on Wed Apr 6 22:42:15 2005