Writers Wiki

By which we don't mean a wiki for a community of writers to talk to each other, although that would be worthwhile in its own right, but a wiki to publish their works. Such a wiki would have unique technical requirements.

Chief among these requirements is the need to reliably identify distinct users. This is because normal writing has a very asymmetric relationship between authors and readers and any publishing tool must maintain this asymmetry. So a normal reader wouldn't be allowed to change more than, say, 1 word per page per day.

There would need to be different classes of users; authors, trusted proofreaders, untrusted readers. Each class has its own privileges. Each story would have its own list of these, preferably set in a reflective manner. So for example, the story MyStory? would have a subpage MyStory?/Meta which only the author could edit, where they could add a collaborating author, and edit the list of proofreaders.

Another feature that might be worth experimenting with would be an unlimited undo capability separate from editing, so that undoing others' bad edits wouldn't use up your edit quota or would use up a different quota. Preferably, the edit and undo quotas would be dynamically allocated, using some kind of social system, and not fixed. I think StoneSociety proposed something like this.

It would also be necessary to be able to flush past versions that are known to be obsolete and to lock pages.

A lot of this - not everything - can be done using the fractality features of ProWikiSoftware. There is a rich and extensible user hierarchy. User registration is available. There are arbitrary page hierarchies. Any page branch can modify inherited configuration otions, e. g. user rights. A branch may have its own layout template, search context, link context and rc like a separate wiki. Not available is restricting edit quotas, but this would be hardly a stumbling stone. -- HelmutLeitner