[dokuwiki] Re: Disabling namespaces in DokuWiki?
- From: Samuel Penn <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 20:51:10 +0000
On Monday 05 January 2009 07:46:04 Martin Erlandsson wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Samuel Penn <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Pretty much the main reason I picked Dokuwiki was that it has
> > hierarchical namespaces, something most (all?) other wiki software
> > lacks.
>
> If namespaces support is a good thing, why don't more wikis have it?
It's a good thing for me. I don't particularly care whether it's
a good thing for everyone (obviously, a massive simplification of
my thoughts, but I'm sure you get the general idea).
> In my view (as previously stated) this is because namespaces go
> against the wiki philosophy.
I also don't care about the "wiki philosophy", whatever that may be.
I want a tool to help me organise information in a way that is
easy to edit and search, and which matches the way that I think.
For me, DokuWiki is that tool. The fact that it happens to be
called a wiki is almost irrelevant.
A hierarchical structure matches the way I think and like to
organise things.
> All pages should be considered as remote
> islands of independent pieces of information.
In pretty much everything I do, pages are highly interelated
pieces of information. If they had to standalone, they would end
up being either non-sensical, or have to repeat lots of information.
Or have a few very large pages.
> That said, I do believe namespaces *could* be useful in some very
> specific, narrow and hierarchical contexts...
Each to their own. I find them highly useful in most contexts.
I can see why they might not be useful in something like Wikipedia,
but I don't use DokuWiki to re-implement Wikipedia.
> > But then, all my wikis contain several very distinct subject
> > areas, with similar topics within each subject. Creating a
> > new wiki for each subject would be a nightware. Whenever I've
> > had to disambiguate pages on flat wikis, it always seems to
> > come down to a poor-man's namespace anyway (e.g., using
> > <namespace>_<topic> as the page name).
>
> I don't think there is anything "poor-man" about this approach.
> Instead, it is a nice way of making the page independently define
> itself! Add proper disambiguation to simplify even further for wiki
> users.
But it's no different to using namespaces, except you have to do
all the work yourself.
--
Be seeing you, http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam. Mail/IM (Jabber): sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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