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Instead of editing conversations like documents, build threaded conversation support into the WikiEngine. Comments are added with “reply to this” buttons, and appear in a hierarchy of comments. Like Slashdot, Kuro5hin.
Right now, if you’re having a discussion on a wiki, it works like this: You read something you want to comment on. You hit the “edit” button. You find the text, again, in a little box. You put in some markers- maybe indent, or italics, to differentiate your response from what was written. You write your text. You sign it. Then you hit the “save” button. Maybe you have accidentally left an italics on or something, and you go fix any problems. At any rate, that’s how it works.
The idea of “built in threading” is that you have some wiki features that help you make your comments. The traditional way of doing this is something like Slashdot or Kuro5hin. You have a nested hierarchy of text. That is, at the base level, you see people kicking in responses to some text. Then you can attach comments to those responses. And then you can attach comments to the comments, and so on.
Now, this is “un-wiki-ish.” The idea of built in threading is not to dispense with wiki. The idea is to let conversations have a form that works well for conversations, and to let documents have a form that works well for documents. You can still cross over text from form to form. You can still copy text from a conversation to a document, or vice versa. But they are distinct. (That distinction can even be embraced- see DocViewThreadViewSplit.)
Who cares? Why do you want the machine to take over thread-view logistics for you? What goodies do we get? We get a lot of goodies.
You could use built in threading with DocViewThreadViewSplit. Briefly, that means that every page is really two pages- a document view, and a thread view, that display side-by-side, or one atop the other. The document view is edited like a normal unthreaded wiki page. The threaded view is edited with built in threading.
Read DocViewThreadViewSplit for more details.
Or you could have special pages called “thread pages.” When you create a page, you decide whether it is document view or thread view. If you choose thread view, the wiki uses the built in threading system.
Or maybe you want to pattern match against the title- if it ends in Discussion or Talk or Conversation, then it’s a built-in thread-mode page.
You could have a thing called “talk rooms.” On any wiki document, you can make a link like so: talk:AboutRobots That link doesn’t take you to a wiki page, it takes you to a talk room. In the talk room, you can add threads, respond to other people’s threads, whatever. And you can link to talk:AboutRobots from any wiki document. You can just as easily make new talk pages- talk:AboutProgramming, talk:AboutAngels, whatever.
You could make the system so that conversations can be followed by email, rss, and/or the web.
So, if you subscribed to a conversation by email, you would receive all additions to the conversation by email. By replying to an email, you would be submitting a post to the conversation.
Or you could just observe with RSS. RSS doesn’t have any capability for letting you contribute, beyond linking to a web page. But if you just want to want to watch the conversation in your ChangeAggregator, RSS would work fine.
And if you want to participate entirely online, writing replies into edit boxes, that can work too.
It should be possible to delete comments, to “clear the board.” Remember that you can’t modify other people’s comments. You can’t make it look like someone said something that they didn’t actually say. But you should be able to delete their comments. It should also be possible to retrieve a thread of comments. Remember that threads are listed from most recent at the top to the oldest at the bottom.
Envision yourself going to the bottom of the threads, and finding some really old discussions. They don’t even apply anymore; Nobody’s posted to them in ages, and they are about an old version of the page anyways. You hit the “delete thread” button on the top of this particular thread, and poof! It’s all gone.
But later, your fellow collaborator remembers that there was something she needed in there. She does not curse; Rather, she looks into the thread history. She digs back a ways, wades through a bunch of garbage, finds the “deleted” thread, and views it there. It hasn’t really been deleted, it’s just been hidden away from the main thread view. Nothing lost.
I’m presently not aware of any wiki engine that does this.
The idea is considered “heretical” to some people. I heard someone say that they “did not approve” of the idea, once.
| status | wiki engines |
|---|---|
| Implemented | - |
| Developing | - |
| Intend to Develop | - |
| Considering | - |
| Rejected | - |
Thread - a thread is a line of discussion. See WikiKM:ThreadMode.