Wiki recommendations -- Practical Experience

[Chris G]

On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 01:53:10AM +0100, Luis Paulo wrote:
> 
> And this do say
> 1. Your users will write text easy, but will take sometime to get used
> to the "tricks". Those "tricks" will allow them to do headings, lists,
> text formating (bold, italic, etc...), links, tables
> 
The markup used by the wiki can make it easier or harder though.  For
example, to my mind, reStructuredText is a far easier markup to use
than most of the ones provided by Wikis.  For example a heading in
reStructuredText is:-

A Heading
=========

Whereas in many/most wiki markups it's:-

=====A Heading=====

The reStructuredText is much more natural and makes the original text
readable as intended.


> 2.
>  a. make PDF is easy as print a html as PDF. Don't know any wiki that
> produces OO. But if the result is html and OO format is XML, is a
> matter of writing a transformation (like a XSLT). Don't know if it
> exist, not saying it is easy.
>  b. a web page can look as a word processing document, is a matter of
> formatting, right?

No, absolutely not!  The point of a web page is to get the information
across to the user in a format that *they* have quite a lot to say
about.  Different people, for example, use different sized screens and
a page that doesn't scale nicely between 800x600 and 1600x1200 (say)
isn't a good web page.  Fixed width layouts can look *very* silly on
my 1920x1200 screen.  There are lots of other things that affect this
too, in particular a web page should do its best to work with the
quirks of different browsers.

[snip]

> 3. Can't imagine a wiki without it. Think of administrating a wiki
> without version regression. I get into your wiki and f**k a hundred
> pages in a few minutes. You must have even more than simple version
> regression, a regression by user/IP, for example. That because backup
> is just what it is, You don't do it every hour, and you don't want to
> loose what your responsible users did. At least you don't want to tell
> them you lost it :)
> 
Depends on the use, I use my wiki just for myself and a couple of
family members, it's closed to the outside world.

-- 
Chris Green