Steve Harris wrote: > Edits by anonymous users needs to be acked by someone, registered users > edits go up immediatly IIUC. I think this is roughly how wikipedia works. That might be how wikipedia works (I haven't tried it in quite a while) but the more traditional wiki way is that user's edits go up immediately (some wikis can require registration, but the more wiki way is not to require registration). Then (in the traditional wiki way) the community around the wiki takes care of vetting the content -- if someone starts putting up trash (I mean real trash, "graffiti", or similar), in an active wiki community, somebody will delete that (revert the page, or similar). If it's just "poor" content, somebody will come along to improve it. It doesn't work 100%, but I am pleasantly surprised at how well it does work on active wikis. (WikiLearn is not quite active enough to benefit (fully) from those effects.) (sorry--I deleted the attribution for the following:) > > I hadn't used a wiki until my first attempt last evening. The one I > > used didn't enforce any specific page formats or content. One thing I > > really appreciate about Dave's site is it's consistency, even if it is > > a bit old school to look at. If there's a wiki way to keep things > > consistent, improve the way it looks, and give helpers access to do > > the dirty work for him, then I'm very much in favor of using a wiki to > > do this. > > Yes, you can do this, wiki have text codes to do things like bullets, and > you can have macros or something similar (e. for including photos in > wikipedia). Most wikis have some sort of consistent look built in (header, footer, maybe sidebar, ...). In addition, some other wikis (like TWiki) also support content templates which help everyone organize their content in a similar fashion. (In a content template (on TWiki) I typically have some (recommended) headings often including a Contributors and Contents heading (with the "code" (%TOC%) to automatically create a Table of Contents). I've used TWiki for quite a while and have liked it. I guess I'm starting to grow discontented--WikiLearn is currently hosted as one TWiki web on the twiki.org site (hosted at Sourceforge). With somewhere around 2000 pages (iirc), some features of TWiki work frustratingly slow (like the More commands that allow you, among other things to rename and "reparent" a page--they fill a drop down box with the name of all pages in the web and it takes a while to do that for 2000 pages.) I need to either move to a different host where I can divide WikiLearn into multiple (and smaller) webs, or consider something like writing my own wiki (which is an itch I have to a certain extent). (TWiki is one of the few wikis that supports multiple webs (think, but don't say in front of a twiki guru, directories or folders). In a similar vein, twiki calls pages: "topics".) Nevertheless, I recommend TWiki. There are some drawbacks. It has a reputation as being difficult to install, and as a Linux newbie (it can be installed on Windows also, but when I was paying attention, that had its share of problems as well) a few years ago, I found that to be the case. There have been improvements since then, but I haven't tried an install recently. TWiki keeps a revision history of each page, so it is fairly easy to revert a page (but, unless I'm overlooking something added recently, it is a copy and paste operation). On Sourceforge one of the /tmp directories occasionally runs out of space, and that seems to disable the recording of page history. Anyway, just thought I'd throw my $.02 (or .03, .04, or whatever) in. Randy Kramer
