[Pmwiki-users] Why heirarchy?

[Fred Chittenden]

> [Original Message]
> From: Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com>
> To: Fred Chittenden <drfredc at earthlink.net>
>
> Indeed, the second question of pages suddenly appearing and usurping link
> targets already exists in the one-level scheme that PmWiki uses, and
> would have worse effects in a multi-level scheme. For example, in PmWiki's
> default configuration, if a sibling target doesn't exist PmWiki looks
> for a group with the same name as the target and links to that if it
> exists. Otherwise it shows the "create new page" link.
>
> At A&M Corpus Christi, the instructors had each student create a personal
> WikiGroup, and within the WikiGroup each student was to create a page
> called "MyGoals". Students would do this by creating their home page,
> adding [[MyGoals]] to the page, clicking on the "non-existent page" link
> to create it, and off they go.
>
> Somehow, someone created a page called MyGoals.MyGoals, so that any
> students who didn't already have a MyGoals page suddenly found their
> [[MyGoals]] links redirecting them to this other page. Worse, few
> of the students noticed that they were no longer in their personal 
> WikiGroup, and began complaining that "someone else keeps editing my 
> goals page" as multiple students ended up inadvertently linking to
> this other page instead of the one in their own WikiGroup.
>
> Placing the separators in RecSoccerBoysU8TeamA so that it becomes
> RecSoccer.BoysU8.TeamA is really not an issue--I agree fully that this
> would be preferable. What *is* an issue is figuring out a consistent 
> mechanism for relative page links to work such that it doesn't lead
> authors to be confused when their links don't go where they expect,
> and why, and how to correct it.
>

What you are describing sort of reminds me of how in early WYSWIG graphical OSs (I think it was on the Amiga, but may have existed elsewhere), your typical bubba novice might copy and past a folder into itself, creating a reiterative nightmare. After the problem was discovered, some safeguards were added to the OS to prevent such occurances. It seems similar safeguards should be added to the wiki page naming parsing logic to prevent MyGoals.MyGoals from ever being created. 

Fred Chittenden
drfredc at earthlink.net
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