Chromatic On The Wiki Plugin For Slash

lisam writes: "The Wiki plugin integrates nicely with Slash and has a lot of cool features, says Chromatic who introduces Wikis and gives a detailed explanation of how and why the Wiki plugin works in this OnLamp article. (chromatic is coauthor of O'Reilly's upcoming Running Weblogs with Slash.)" A lot of people just think of Slashdot style sites when thinking of the Slash codebase, but this article goes on about how to extend slash in cool ways. If you are interested in plugins, the repository is a good place to start.

Re:I wonder....

[Afrosheen]

I'd like to see a list of my posts, along with who moderated them to what level. Moderators should be given more responsibility to do what's right, i.e. mod up interesting/insightful posts rather than mod down trolls. Trolls and redundant/flame posts are not hard to mod down but an AC that posts something good is difficult to mod up at times.

Consider balancing the karma system..if you give someone moderator rights, and 5 points, make 2 of those negative points and the remaining 3 positive.

Re:I wonder....

[Fishstick]

Interesting idea, why don't you ask taco [slashdot.org]? ;-)

Re:I wonder....

[IIOIOOIOO]

I disagree.... Honestly, I worry that seeing who axed your last post might encourage retributive axing of their later post. Although, you increase the number of available points, make them positive-only, and introduce a time-based rating decay. That way, posts in which no one saw redeeming value would fairly quickly degrade off of the average users page-view.

Modding: Art or Science?

[Renraku]

Modding is of course an art. There is no clear-cut mod for every post. A Slashdot template would be cool, but it might bring the problems of Slashdot with it. Trolls, flamers, the Slashdot effect, webhosting costs. All of those things would slap down most smaller sites that are gaining in popularity. A more efficient style should be adopted to keep costs down, trolls and flamers at bay, and a cache system for articles would be nice, too.

Wikis and Weblogs, A Match Made in Heaven

[Eloquence]

You may be interested in reading this proposal [kuro5hin.org] I have made for Scoop, which is the engine that runs K5. Both Scoop and Slashcode are written in Perl, so it may be possible to develop a shared Wiki plugin.

The idea to combine wikis and weblogs is very promising. The sequential nature of weblogs is great for news, but not for acting on these news in a sustained fashion. If Slashdot writes about some political issue, if actions are taken they are usually short-lived, or move to other mailing lists. Similarly, wikis can combine sites which host both a lot of persistent knowledge (e.g. papers, essays) with the dynamic, community-creating nature of a weblog. I plan to eventually run violence.de [violence.de] as a wiki-weblog, with the wiki (access-restricted) storing the papers, film pages etc., and the weblog reporting about current issues (sexual repression, censorship, new studies etc.) -- mail me [mailto] if you want to help.

Wikis, when properly deployed, are the missing component to make weblogs truly useful. With properly deployed, I mean that typical wiki idiosyncrasies need to be avoided: Nobody really wants to use WikiStyleLinks, they make text harder to read and are difficult to get rid of once you have decided to use them. Choose E2 [everything2.com] or Wikipedia [wikipedia.com] style links instead. Also, access restrictions are necessary in many contexts. See the article for some further design details.

Re:Wiki for work?

[NetMasta10bt]

We've been using TWiki for the past year at work, and it is an excellent way to collaborate on documenation. It makes it really easy for anyone to make an update, or correction, and allows people to recieve email updates when content changes. The search engine also makes it easy to get the information you need quickly.

Re:Wiki as a submission queue?

[chromatic]

That is indeed what I had in mind. If/When this appears, it would be possible to write feature articles (a book review, an investigation of some kind, a fiction story) in the Wiki, with authors correcting things or adding details and links to other information.

It would be interesting to see the revisions of a Story done this way.

wiki

[Robert Frazier]

After trying slash, zope+slashdot, and a more barebones setup, I've gone with with the twiki implementation of a wiki web. I'm quite happy with that, although, a more heavily used site might well need a DB backend.

An aside. I think that telling users that they can actually *edit* pages scares them a bit.

Best wishes,
Bob

Re:I wonder....

[notfancy]

Yes, and another thing about moderating. I've been refusing to moderate for a few months simply because I've noted that you can loose your own karma for moderating.

I thought that was what karma means...It makes you think before you mod down ("do I really want to loose one karma point on this post?"), and it makes you think before you mod up ("do I really want to loose one karma point on this post?"). Either way, you think before you mod (I am tempted to add a "QED", but I'm reading too much Dijkstra lately, and I'm slowly appreciating the inherent ugliness in case analysis. If only I could come up with a constructive proof that "karma works").

Writing Rant

[jallen02]

I would just like to say how thankless a task writing can really be. Writing involves tremendous amounts of work, especially technical books. The pressures on a writer of a technical topic are incredible. The amount of time it takes for a technical book to go from inception to print is usually a lot less than most other types of books. The turn around time must be minimal because technology evolves so quickly. I have found such a profound admiration for good books, and for the people who dedicate large chunks of their lives to sharing their knowledge.

A truly well written book is such a blessing when you wish to learn the subject matter. It is difficult to fully appreciate it unless you have written a a book, or parts of one. So, good luck with the rest of your book Chromatic, I look forward to a book by a fellow /.er.

I have always found chromatic's writing here quite well thought. The philosophy and psychology behind online communities fascinating. I have also found slashcode to be much better than most people give it credit for, mainly because it is Perl. Anyhow.

Jeremy