Old Talk With David Martland
Old Talk With David MartlandThis page contains some older discussion from TalkWithDavidMartland? (the talk page for DavidMartland).
David, setting up a wiki server is pretty trivial, and far more appropriate for your experiments. I don't expect you will have much luck keeping your WalledGarden intact here, as many people dislike the practice, and will remove your pages.
OK - see my reply in the Sandbox area. I'm not fighting, but ... [ DavidMartland ]
Also, if you really don't want me on this Wiki, I should be able to move to another one which is friendlier. It would help me if you could give me time to migrate the text, otherwise I'll just have to do it all off-line, and dump it into one - which seems rather unfriendly, but perhaps necessary. [ DavidMartland ]
David, why don't you and your students just use this Wiki like anybody else? Why do you need a private WalledGarden?
OK - I'm quite happy not to have a WalledGarden - though I could make arguments for them, but I can see you'll just delete anything which I write which looks like one. And ... BTW ... you are still anonymous. [DavidMartland]
Another problem with this Wiki thing is that it is very hard to know "where it starts". If I remember rightly, there is a page somewhere by Ward, which suggests that the focus of this Wiki is on Software, and also on People, but there is no clear entrance to the Wiki, and I wonder if the original intention has been completely lost by now. I am not convinced that the WikiCommunity is being over helpful by not making this clear. [DavidMartland]
See StartingPoints
One of the most interesting things about Wiki is that there is no true "Start Point" after a little while. All paths are intertwined and linked in meaningful, but often unexpected ways. While it's true that this wiki does have a focus on software development (originally more specifically patterns), it's also true that there is a tremendous variety of content online here. Periodically people may go through and refactor content by moving pages to other wiki sites that seem to be more appropriate such as GreenCheese. You never can tell how any specific addition you may have will be reacted to, but as long as it is delivered with true WikiSpirit?, it will eventually end up in the right spot. I think the major problem you are running into with the WalledGarden is that it attempts to set aside a segment of the Wiki for a smaller groups private use, something that is a bit antithetical to our purpose here. If you'd like some technical assistance in getting a wiki set up, I'd be pleased to offer some guidance. System requirements are very minimal. You could probably get by with a 486dx machine running win95 an personal web-server (although that makes me cringe a bit.)
In answer to the items you listed on my name page, it's been my personal experience that in general with Wiki, the simpler the setup the more efficient it is. I've worked a great deal with two variants:
TWikiWiki is a much more full-featured product, featuring version control, page locking while doing edits (to prevent concurrent overwrites), a preview mode, multiple sub-wiki support, etc. It has a larger number of package requirements (rcs, etc.) but is well documented and seems to perform quite well.
The real question here seems to be "What is most appropriate for your expected usage patterns?" NOTE: The following is all speculation on my part. You mentioned that this is for a class, so I'd guess that the user base will be between 20-120 students. Of that, if we estimate a 40% participation rate on a regular basis (which seems like a high estimate) we have 8-48 users. Assuming users post 10 pages a day, you've got a max of 480 transactions per day, and if we assume this to occur during a peak period (Say 10am-12pm, 2pm-4pm) of four hours, we get 120 transactions per hour, or 2 per minute as an upper bound. At this rate, even a very slow system will be able to accommodate your needs, so you'll have to look at how much functionality you require. More functionality = larger management burden. If you can get by with it, I'd say look at the original wiki script since it's a no-brainer to get running (basically, install it like any other CGI script and edit a couple of parameters.)
You will want to have this on a machine that is online 24/7, but since the bandwidth consumed is minimal (it's only text) you could very possibly get by with one of the free-hosting services. All you need is one with simple cgi+db support (db as in Berkley [sp?] dbm not Oracle or Sybase.) If this is for a CS class, you might even find students willing to do all the setup and management for you.
In terms of security, you might be best to use the webserver to restrict access to the directories to valid users instead of relying on increased functionality in the Wiki script itself. Hope at least some of this is useful. -- SeanMcNamara
We are a legion :-) There are more people here talking to you. Besides, one single person cannot delete pages here. I don't know about the others, but I am not anonymous - you can see who edited this page by clicking on the "last edited" link below. -- GregorRayman
OK - thanks Gregor. Someone did just go through and put "delete" in all the other pages - perhaps justifiably, but I would have liked the chance to discuss this first. Anyway, it looks as though most of the pages have now gone. This seems different from WikiPedia, where I still haven't a clue how to delete a page - though personally I have no need, or desire to do so, as I think there are some privileged WikiPedians who administer this. [DavidMartland]
From experience, immediate deletion without comment or discussion is the fastest way to boost you up the wiki learning curve towards being a productive, involved wiki member (contrast with wiki user). Unfortunately, this method involves some temporary pain on your part, but as my old philosophy prof used to say, "All learning is painful." Sorry about that. Now that the initial unpleasantries are out of the way, welcome to the wiki! -- AndyPierce
David, to delete a page you simply have to replace the text with the word "delete" and perhaps a small explanation. (e.g. DeleteTestAndWelcome). The page still remains in Wiki and can be recovered by the EditCopy feature. To really delete the page another user has to edit it again, change the text to a different "delete" text. See HowToDeletePages -- GregorRayman
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