I ran the NexistWiki 1.0 experiment long enough to conclude (rightly or
wrongly) that WikiWords *as emergent links* was, in my view, a bad idea.
That conclusion is biased by the nature of the NexistWiki experiment, which
was and remains an experiment in building knowledge bases (read: topic
maps) out of content provided by users. The experiment is fairly anal
about the notion of collecting relationships between content elements. (01)
My evaluation of what was growing at 1.0 led me to conclude that, while the
Wiki page handler's ability to grab WikiWords and turn them into hrefs was
cute, powerful, and obviously a good idea in the main, it interfered
greatly with the idea that one should actually identify the nature of the
relationship which animates the new link. (02)
I therefore, in following versions, now up to 1.8+, turned off the Wiki
aspect of the page handler and relegated the ad-hock creation of new pages
to the relationship manager. It is possible, though not documented or
encouraged, to go to any page in NexistWiki, click on "add" in the Related
Pages box (assuming you are logged in), select a relation, and type in a
new page name, and NexistWiki will gladly build that page for you if it
doesn't already exist. The advertised way to build a new page is by
navigating to Stories or Topics (or Associations), and click the "new" link
and press on. Then, when the new page is built, use the relation manager to
link it in where you think appropriate. (03)
I have no ax to grind for or against the WikiWord itself. I just don't use
it as advertised in _The Wiki Way_. (04)
Oh, btw: the way to put an href in NexistWiki content is, you guessed it,
with the <a href=... stuff. If you just happen to put in, say,
<a href="SomeWikiWord">SomeWikiWord</a>, you will get precisely the same
behavior as if SomeWikiWord was just typed into a standard Wiki. (05)
Jack
At 11:50 AM 5/12/2003, Eugene Kim wrote:
>On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 07:12:31PM +0100, Peter P. Jones wrote:
>
> > Wiki words are bowing and scraping to the inadequacies of the tools.
> > Secondly, mashing concepts together in unwarranted neologisms
> > actually encourages conceptual elision, increases misunderstandings
> > between disparate cliques, and reduces the chances of finding
> > important 'missing nothings'...imho.
><snippage/>
>WikiWords are what they are. You can like them or not. The Wikipedia
>folks decided they didn't like them, and I think Wikipedia is an
>excellent example of emergent behavior. WikiWords have affordances,
>but I don't think those affordances are so groundbreaking that similar
>tools won't have similar or even better effects.
>
>-Eugene
>
>--
>This message is archived at:
>
>http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=tools-yak&i=20030512185052.GJ4031@douge.blueoxen.net
>
> (06)
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XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web.
Addison-Wesley. Jack Park, Editor. Sam Hunting, Technical Editor (07)
Build smarter kids globally to reduce the need for smarter bombs. (08)
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