[Pmwiki-users] notes on pmwiki documentation

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at sci.tamucc.edu
Sat Mar 1 15:37:09 CST 2003


On Sat, 1 Mar 2003, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:

> > Are you suggesting that all of the pages provided with PmWiki belong
> > in the PmWiki group, or just some of them?
> 
> The former.

Here's a scenario which illustrates one of the difficulties I have
with this approach.  I'll grant at the outset that this scenario might
be unrealistic and/or that I'm just being overly paranoid.

A relatively new user gets onto a PmWiki site and begins browsing
the pages.  In particular there are a number of pages that describe
the WikiWikiWeb and how easy it is to edit pages simply by clicking
on the "edit page" link at the bottom of the page.  So, our user
does what it says, adds "MyNewWikiPage" into one of the existing 
documentation pages (in the PmWiki group), follows the link to begin 
creating his own pages, and lo-and-behold he happily begins creating 
a whole slew of new pages and links within the PmWiki WikiGroup, 
when really a site administrator would probably prefer those pages 
to be created in "Main", at least.

Perhaps this is a futile dream, but I think it should be possible for
people to create and edit pages in PmWiki without having to understand
WikiGroups, and that such newly created pages will be placed 
somewhere reasonable such as "Main" rather than "PmWiki".  I'm just
afraid that explaining WikiGroups increases the learning curve just
a bit too much.

Or perhaps it's just not worth worrying about.  I'm already seeing on
the SciTechWiki and TAMUCCWiki that a person or group creates lots
of pages within "Main", and then either they or someone else comes 
along soon afterwards and moves them into a WikiGroup.  So maybe it's
a self-resolving problem.

Pm





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