some thougths on devuan wiki
What is the purpose of a wiki ? To facilitate tele-collaboration on editing texts . In short tele-co-text-editing. So it must allow access from the internet to text resources. And must be ultra sexy. And by sexy a mean recombinator facilitator. What processes promote that ? And must have processes that promote a type of community integration that is continuous..that means it never stops once started and promote intergration. Intergration means short path between previously misaligned wfs and also consensus building. Without consensus building and wf intergration there is no project cohesion. Consensus building seems linked to the identity-recognition of the members. That again links to other processes that are for humans make more sense outside cyberspace.
Without integration and consensus building non stop processes a wiki could become a series of blogs. Like my pages in their current status.
is a wiki a email group ?
I think a wiki should be perhaps a piece of the community continuous integration . email groups, forums , ie , all seem to help in complementary ways.
a toolbar that misaligns with my goals.
A toolbar should contain frequent processes of my workflow. And in my current flow i rarely use it, and bullet list can not work by bulk select as i would want it. So my ideal toolbar would contain entirely different commands that put in lower priority editing.
section-granularity page editing
Trying to work on my window managers page trying to navigate in the hierarchy of the page while editing become unbearable.
Imagine being a surgeon and you want to operate in the little finger of a patient and in order for the operation to proceed the whole body must be opened. (scary eh? )
When we edit a page we loose navigation throught the contents. If i want to take a look at another section of a page i must do a scan-sequential search . One solution is to have another browser tab with the page .
Allowing to edit the wiki of one section of a page. (i think that my mind gets overwhelmed seeing all the wiki-text of the sections of the page that i dont want to edit).
Workflow antihoarding processes (Protection and Access control schemes).
RMS hated passwords. But i think protection and accounts have positive sides. Like protecting your workflow. I think even RMS would hated to be interrupted while speaking. And what is an interruption if not a unwanted disruption of a certain workflow by other processes that dont align with your goals?
In the era of the great hype-engines and aggressive ai crawlers also we have a workflow disruption of a different kind. Its kind of a lurker process that taps on a workflow but not in a reciprocal balanced relation of exchange but in a way that the semantical connotations tend to align with the behavior of a thief and not a honest collaborator. Is a lurker thief like mentality that tries to hoard valuable data without a process of consensus building. Imagine all those apps that even target kids and try to record their voices. Lets pause here. Does this kid need protection? Is the kid in danger? What kind of danger? And how that protection process work? How do smartphone related operating systems and apps users and parents approach that issue? To my knowledge all relevant protect processes entail an access control semantics. Even telling the kid to not speak!
So how can a wiki workflow can be protected from data sniffers hoarders piggies ? Is this an access control process? It seems so. Do access control processes-schemes align with the libre source ethos? Is this copyright land semantics? Internet archive lately faces great pressure from the organized publishers. Is internet archive a data sniffer or data liberator ?
searching the wiki
reading wiki pages
- it would be nice to have collapsing headings
editing text pages
- it would be nice to have collapsing headings.
Collapsing creates mentaly a sane info closure . It does that by hiding from our plainsight possibly irrelevent info. It would be best to have at our tips available the info that the authors finds relative. That would require dynamical search functionality on existing wiki workflows. Of course establishing a link to another's author workflow would sould push notification to that author since s(he) maybe want to reciprocate the connection.
co-editing
The toolbar should contain tools that facilitate :
- intergration (to other workflows)
- for example search-completion to other workflows names-tags.
- validation
- help
Mark text blocks
We may want to mark a block either to keep white space safe or for style specific to source type of the text.
For preformatted text blocks, use the ... markup.
creating pages
The first step to create a new page is to edit an existing page and add a link to the page you want to create. To link to your new page, you must choose a name for it. The best names describe the page's contents well, so that everyone can remember and type the name easily.
To create a link, surround the page name with double brackets. Typing my new page? will create a link to my new page?.
You can see that the links to my new page? all have question marks after them. That's because my new page? hasn't been written yet. Clicking the link as second step will take you to an edit form where you could write and finally save the new page.
renaming a page
deleting a page
To delete a wiki page, edit the page, select (highlight) all text in the edit textarea, and replace it with the single word delete
It is a good idea to add a comment to the edit summary field explaining why you deleted the page. (The field summary is usually found just below the edit textarea).
On saving the change the page is deleted. As an added safety feature, the deleted page still exists on the server (with a timestamp) and can be restored to the former page by the wiki administrator.
footnotes
PmWiki support footnotes by functionality extensions (called recipes in pmwiki ):
footnotes recipe