[Pmwiki-users] Why heirarchy?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 09:26:06AM -0700, Fred Chittenden wrote:
> 
> > Would this be a case where a wiki farm is useful? 
> >
> 
> Farms would not be practical because there are 400 teams, each with their
> own roster and other associated team pages.  [...]
> 
> That being said, I suppose farms might work if there were a simple one
> click process for an enduser to create a farm.  

John Rankin's WikiFarms Cookbook recipe (PmWiki 1) does allow authors
to create farms by simply listing them on a web page.  (It's a different
approach to WikiFarming; and I'm still open for good candidates to rename
the distribution's version of "wiki farming".)

> However, one shouldn't lose sight that farm applications would remain
> basically be a workaround for pmwiki having such a limited hierarchy.  Kind
> of a like a kludge to workaround a generic shortcoming...  Seems fixing the
> shortcoming would be more appropriate and then the kludge actually can be
> developed from the perspective of offering a useful feature, not a kludge.  

*sigh*  PmWiki doesn't have and has never had a "hierarchy", much less
a limited one.  (Unless you're counting a single level of groups+pages
a 'hierarchy'.)  

What you're calling a "shortcoming" is to many of us a desirable feature, 
so to claim that the WikiFarm approach is a "workaround" is to 
assume that hierarchies are inherently superior to wikigroups, which 
hasn't been demonstrated yet.  As I painfully discovered while trying 
to prototype an implementation of Christian's proposed hierarchical syntax 
over the weekend, WikiGroups are *not* just simple subsets of hierarchies
or a one-level hierarchy...they're in fact a different structure.

Pm