[Pmwiki-users] Mail interface for adding to pages (was Action or form a new page)

[Christian Ridderström]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> This is another of those cases where I think it's a good idea to
> propose a new feature idea to the mailing list and for us to make sure
> that the description makes it into wiki pages somehow.

Background:
> Which brings me to a (IMO) very important idea, in answer to the
> question that John Feezell posed in his email about new features for
> the wiki [1].  Earlier in January there was a discussion thread [2] about
> making sure that information gems from the listserv making it into
> recorded history somewhere.

> I think PmWiki (or at least the PmWiki developers) could really use
> automated support for this, and it might be very useful for
> collaborative contexts in general-- much more powerful than what can be
> done with simple listserv or news archives.

I agree it'll be useful in general, but if we want something "today" we
should probably start "light" :-)

> What I really wish I could do is to use my mail agent to forward excerpts
> of an email message such as Christian's to be posted (appended?) to a 
> wiki page.

And you want to use your MUA because that's where you "were" when reading
the news/mail? (This is just a check really).

> Ideally I don't want to [clip]

I took the "clipped" paragraph above and tried to extract the purpose 
and goals into a list below (and probably added some of my own in the 
process). 

Purpose: Be able to take the important ideas from a new or mailing list
and "store" them on a wiki so that they don't get lost.

Items:
 * This should be quick and simple to do.
 * You do it by forwarding the relevant post
 * Do a 'one-way-pass' over the mail, adding simple markup that
   indicates what should go where.
 * The receiving software do simple reformatting of '> ' etc
 * It's not important that the formatted result in the wiki is perfect

> It would be somewhat resistant to spam because the posted sections of
> text have to first be delimited by markup before they appear in a page.  
> (We can come up with simple mechanisms to easily post an entire message
> to a page if needed.)

We could require that the subject of the forwarding message contain
something specific.

> Other ideas or comments related to this?  What sorts of markup directives
> and other features are needed or desirable?

How about using this markup for the forwarded message:
   append     ::= '[[append' +ws page-reference ['#' anchor] *ws ']]'
   append-end ::= '[[append-end]]'

   prepend     ::= '[[prepend' +ws page-reference ['#' anchor] *ws ']]'
   prepend-end ::= '[[prepend-end]]'

where the optional anchor allows us to add text before/after that anchor.

 
Ideas:
* The information added to the wiki should contain a 'signature' or 
   something, so others now it came via an e-mail, and from where.

* We should take advantage of being able to refer to posts as
	http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/2429
   and more importantly, to entire threads as:
	http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/2395

   Messages read through gmane contain:
	Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user:2407
   which should be possible to extract.

* We can use the 'Subject:' to indicate actions or other things


Questions:
* Do we only want to append information to pages?
* Should information be allowed to be appended to any page?
* Should pages that allow information to be appended contain special 
  markup, thus also indicating where the information is added?
* Should anyone be allowed to do this?

/Christian

> References:
> 
> 1.  http://pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users_pmichaud.com/2004-February/002397.html
> 2.  http://pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users_pmichaud.com/2004-January/001808.html

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr