Todd Walton wrote:
Thoughts On A Personal Wiki
I have a personal wiki. I don't use it much. I should probably make more
use of it. I have a work wiki and other project specific wiki's where
lots of stuff goes though.
From a technical perspective, I wish we had the Tracy-style "editor of
choice in the text box". I'm a wiki-gnome in Wikipedia parlance,
which means I pretty much only correct spelling and grammar and make
certain limited structural improvements to an article. But now that
Since we still don't have such a thing despite so many programmers using
web browsers these days I use ZWiki in a plone site and use the
"External Editor" functionality. Instead of clicking the edit tab on the
wiki page I click the pencil icon which sends me the wiki page with a
mime type which fires off a little python program which comes with the
External Editor Plone Product which then fires off my editor of choice
(currently emacs) and then when I save it the page gets uploaded back to
the wiki via WebDAV. Very slick system.
I'm creating whole paragraphs of text, I'm noticing that wiki markup
is really not what I'd prefer to be using. Sometimes I'd like to be
using Markdown, and sometimes I'd like to have OpenOffice controlling
the text box. Why can't I just highlight text and hit Ctrl-B?
ZWiki supports plaintext, HTML, structured text, restructured text (a
couple kinds of wiki markups and the standard markup for python
documentation), and some others IIRC.
From a text-technical perspective, the wiki model kind of assumes that
you're going to have articles with definite, discrete, names. But on
this personal level, I have all sorts of things to say that don't
necessarily pigeon hole so well. I may have an article about my
favorite authors and then an article about the kinds of books I like
to read, and there's definite overlap. Should they be combined?
Should there be a cross reference link at the top of each article? I
don't want to spend a whole lot of time on structure.
I don't worry much about the names of my articles and instead use
ZWiki's excellent search capability to find my stuff.
From a social perspective, if I create a piece of text then I have
some personal claim to it, and an expectation that it will be viewed
as something that is mine. Should my partner and I be editing each
others' work? Spelling and grammar can be easily overlooked. But
structural changes might affect content. Changing the content
outright would be... just... not right. But this goes against the
very grain of a wiki.
The idea of the public wiki is that the information belongs to everyone
and anyone can change anything. If you don't want other people messing
with your wiki make it private. If you have a partner than you will have
to work out ownership issues and proper etiquette between yourselves.
One last thing. From a user perspective, my partner is using the wiki
for keeping track of upcoming events, and I think she's just fighting
an uphill battle on that one. A wiki is *not* suited for such a
thing. I'll let her discover that on her own.
I'm not so sure it's a bad idea. A lot of people and software projects
use their wiki as their whole website. What's the difference between a
wiki page that goes out of date as each current even comes and goes and
a static HTML page that does the same? The difference is that the wiki
page is usually part of a CMS which means it can be much more easily
edited and searched etc. I think that is a win.
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Tracy R Reed Read my blog at http://ultraviolet.org
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