Ideas for integrating some wiki in the Trust-forum project
Purposes
It aims to be good for a diversity of purposes, in particular:
- Personal web pages
- Web sites of communities, companies, political parties...
- Things like wikipedia
- Links directories : something more open (or sometimes more close, as every author wants) and flexible than dmoz.orgText formating
We
can consider to allow for a diversity of syntax of paging systems (and
possibly convert from one to another ?) - including some WYSIWYG
(This is not a priority)
I mean that there is for example the wikimedia syntax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial_%28Formatting%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial_%28Wikipedia_links%29
but different wikis may have a different syntax (I don't know precisely)
Also
there is the TEX syntax for mathematical texts, that may be processed
by tth or I don't know what. (I'm not sure whether tth is the right way
to make web pages with mathematics but it's just to give you a general
idea of the goal).Rights systems
Wiki pages will be organised
into different spaces, where each space has its own rights system
type and rights table, and contain an arbitrary number of wiki pages.
This ordering of pages into different spaces can be made in the form of folders, with urls like
http://myserver.com/Peterscommunity/ourconceptionoflife
(see remark below on addressing problem)
The rights system will be very similar to what is presently implemented in forum, namely:
- To allow for a diversity of rights systems - when a user comes to a space, an internal function is called to determine the
user's right to this space and store it to session variables. From a rights
system to another, the computation may be different. For example, in
the future, some rights will be calculated out of the trust system.
- The list of rights levels will be : nothing - see - see history - edit - admin
Problem:
the same web page may contain different parts with different rights
systems (see below the quotations system). For example, in a forum,
there are different messages with each different rights below the whole
forum's rights.
Authorship
The program should let the owner of a set of wiki pages select
which one(s) among the 3 following options will be available to the
visitors looking for contacts:
- To an address (author)
- A public forum. In wikimedia is a wiki page for discussion.
Why
not, a forum for discussion instead of a wiki discussion page? Indeed,
a forum associated with a web page is precisely what is happening in
blogs! (One detail: a wiki page will have public discussion forum whose
messages are themselves encapsulated wikis, with strictly private
rights and personal contact).
- Another idea, that would be
complicated but perhaps interesting : a collective (or personal)
nickname, that would be (for the purpose of the trust system)
internally associated to the owner of this set of wiki pages; on the
other hand, would let the visitors of this page create a thread in a
private forum in the following way: the visitor creating the thread
would have supplementary right of access to this thread only, while a
set of registered users in the forum rights table will have access to
all threads. It would bring together in one forum, to the team of
publishers of the original wiki page, the various private discussions
with visitors.History
Take
the same principle as the save-preview-post now implemented in the
forum, that is, valid/invalid status of new entries. A user that edits
a page may store it as a draft that only he can see and edit. So in
history there will be drafts (also called "hidden" or "invalid") that
are only visible by their authors, and can be deleted or modified
without trace (except that the date updates to last modification date).
And the idea that something validated can be invalidated again as long
as it was not seen by anyone else. (Will the date of a version be the
one of last editing or last validation ?)
Subdivisions - Quotations system
A wiki page will be subdivised into different parts (paragraphs)
This will have 3 uses:
- Possibility to edit only one part
- For the development of a translations system where a user only translates one paragraph at a time
- For quotation inside another wiki page
Problem: how would quotes work ? what if a quote contains another quote ?
Here is an idea of how it could work:
A
user requests a wiki page A. The server, before sending it, observes
that page A contains a quotation of page B. So it connects to B's host
(if it does not have a recent cache copy) to request B. If B contains a
quote, it will not be operated by B's host but by A. If there is a
loophole or if there are more than 4 levels of quotation (for example),
it gives up and displays a not-operated quotation sign that can be done
if user requests it.
Usefulness of quotes
Different authors
can make redundant lists of links to other sites (with each his
appreciation for selection). But if someone referenced at different
places wants to update the title or description, or even the entry
address or host, how can he do without contacting all list authors ?
The
solution is that the author of a site offers some shorter or longer
models of links to his site with descriptions. Then a links page will
be made of a list of quotations.
Other usefulness: Instead of
being integrated to a wiki page, quotations could be used by other
programs, like user board, news systems, calendar system...
Integration with Global Login System and Bookmarks
Links must be
GLS active : if you follow a link you go through a
redirection through home host to be identified; probably the best
option is to use a temporary pseudo. A temporary pseudo is a pseudo
that only exists during session, to browse read-only host B,
anonymously except for the data of what is the home host A. This way,
host B does not know who is the user but can interact with A who knows
who he is.
This opens the possibility of the following functions:
- To add a page or a link to bookmarks (stored in the user's account in A) (a pop-up will appear with the title to be edited for display in
the list of bookmarks - would it be
pre-filled and how ?)
- To
swich to an authentication under a true pseudo (replacing the
temporary pseudo by a true one) by a pop-up in home host that displays
the pseudos list of the user, for choosing one.
We might add the option for hurrying visitors, to switch to a
fast method of bookmarking which would accumulate rapidly bookmarks
without question.
But the implementation of such an option may not be necessary ...
There is a need to find a way to cut and paste links or
bookmarks to the content of a wiki page (particularly to a message
forum, where they will be rebuilt from the wikis).
Addressing problem
We should think of the addressing system of pages: I
consider to do in the whole project an internal addressing system built
over, which would replace the traditional URLs, especially with the
advantage of allowing special characters: spaces and accents...Headers
In the headers of each page, should be the following (here is a list in disorder, maybe not comprehensive ?):
"quit",
"home", possibly "discussion" and/or "author", possibly"history";
"bookmarks list" (=pop-up to home site), "add to bookmarks" (to be
replaced by "remove from bookmarks" if the page is one of the bookmarks
from the user).
To know the list of all existing wiki systems you can follow these links:
http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RunningYourOwnWikiFaq
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Groupware/Wiki/Wiki_Engines/
http://ikiwiki.info/
http://www.weblogkitchen.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
and all connected articles, particularly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitext
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliki