[Zope-dev] I feel your Wiki Pain ;-)

[Chris Withers]

Toby Dickenson wrote:
> http://www.zope.org/WikiCentral/FrontPage lists most Zope Wikis. Does
> anyone else find Wikis to be far less convenient than a good old
> mailing list?

Each has their ups and downs :-S

> 1. No threading. On several occasions I have made comments in a Wiki
> that were subsequently ignored - I guess because they got lost in the
> mass of other edits. Recently people have been adding edits to the end
> of the page: This makes it easier to keep track of changes, but harder
> to catch up on a discussion when you come to it for the first time.

...and there's still the problem of finding out who made what changes to
what. I thought 2.2's history-isms would help here?

> 2. No personal replies. On several occasions I would have liked to
> email a comment personally to another contributer, but they didnt
> leave an email address.

That's a tough one though, isn't it?

> 3. No update notification. The one time I was update to keep up with a
> Wiki discussion involved the other participant always manually
> emailing a change notification.

Yeah, that's not _that_ hard to do, and I wish it'd be done a long time
ago :-S

> 4. Hard to keep track of many Wikis: Each wiki has its own 'whats
> changed' page, but even those are too coarse.

Yeah, that is a tough one too :-S

> 5. Too easy to fragment a discussion. On several occasions I have
> thought that a discussion had dried up, only to find out later on that
> it had moved to another page.

...that's just bad use of Wiki, although sadly, that's qutie easy to
do...

> 8. Editing is painful. I have to use the browsers text field, and the
> whole Wiki page has to make a round trip with every change.

What about FTP? I'm pretty sure you can do it into zope.org although I
can never remember the port number :-S

> 9. I never get the structured text quoting of python source right
> first time.

DTML is _that_ much worse too :S < and RSI anyone? ;-)

> 10. There are too many empty pages, because someone has clicked on a ?
> next to word that happened to be a WikiName. Useful pages lie hidden
> behind a sea of links to empty pages.

Yeah, this also makes the RecentChanges page kindof useless too :-S

Okay, here's an idea which people may or may not like:
How about running the 'Discussion' parts of (in particular) dev.zope.org
from ZDiscussions, ZUBB or Squishdot?
These products are designed for discussion and are better at it than a
Wiki. Speaking for Squishdot, you get a lot of notifcation (not as much
as I'd like, wait for Swishdot for that ;-) and threading, and it's even
got Stuctured Text support now.

<end of advert ;-)>

I dunno about other people, but I've given up on dev.zope.org simply
because I cannot track the changes without having to put in a
disproportionate amount of work.

This has meant that a lot of proposals which could help with things that
I really hate about Zope (DTML, lack of ability to 'hide' methods like
standard_html_footer from URL access, lack of groups in Zope security) I
haven't had the opportunity to comment on in a useful way (yes, yes, no
comments about my views being useful ;-) way.

end of Rant II ;-)

Chris