Post Hoary

[Simon Michael]

Corey Burger wrote:
> Watchlists are pages that allow you to chose a subsection of the wiki
> to watch for changed. Basically a filtered recent changes. 

I see. We presently provide that via mail subscription to pages of 
interest. But there's no web-based feature for filtering RC. It's not a 
hard feature to implement if becomes a priority.

A related, low tech approach is to subscribe to the whole wiki  or to 
the rss feeds in WikiWishlist and set up filter rules in your reader.

> As for page parenting, I find it very counter intuitive and rigid.
> Wikis allow really easy linking. Categories are far more flexible.
> Categories essentially allow a page to have several "parents", the
> categories.

Ok, but how does the option to set parents interfere with easy linking, 
or the use of category markers (WikiBadges) ?

Note you can set multiple parents (perhaps there is an issue with the 
plone skin not displaying this clearly). And you're free to leave your 
pages with no parent, to use wiki badges, to link anywhere, to use name 
prefixes and suffixes, as you prefer.

I'm not sure if you're arguing against the notion of parenting, or it's 
use in the ubuntu wiki. Here's why I personally like it:

- it helps me get an overview and mentally chunk the soup of pages into 
larger, logical pieces, when needed

- it allows me to 'alt u' up to the next level when I'm looking at a 
too-detailed page and want a bigger picture

- it links the subtopics automatically, freeing me from the need to 
maintain those links and making it very cheap to move pages around

- it allows me to print a logical group of pages as a single document 
(eg http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DocumentationArea/print)

- it gives the possibility of subscribing to a logical group of pages
(not implemented)

Just my 2c. Wikipedia does fine without it and if the community would 
rather not have it, I'll hide some or all of it.


Thanks for this useful discussion.