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.org

Text 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:
Problem: the same web page may contain different sections or quotes with different rights systems (see below the quotations system). For example, a forum has different messages, each editable (like a wiki ?) only by its author (and, for some big public forums, also by admin ?).

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! In this forum, like in any forum, each message would be an encapsulated wiki, in the sense that it can have some wiki's text formatting, and be editable by its author (i.e. with a private editing right and personal contact), with recorded history (but, for this small history to feel more convenient than the big history of big wiki articles, it can be browsed with arrow buttons).

- Another more complicated but also interesting option, for a page that has a group of editors identified by a collective nickname (but that would also have an owner for the purpose of the trust system) : each visitor can contact the group by creating a thread accessible by only him and the group ; each member of the group can also access the list of all such threads.

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:
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