[dokuwiki] Re: Minor edits question
- From: "Daniel Mitchell" <DanielMitchell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 17:10:47 -0600
> I like your ease-of-use argument. A minor edit should
> possibly be easier than a major one. It suggests to me that
> maybe we ought to interpret an empty summary as a minor edit.
> On the other hand, an empty summary could mean, "I forgot."
And is that such a terrible thing?
> POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE: Maybe empty summaries are considered
> minor edits, but if you ever go to save with no summary, you
> first get a popup asking you if you meant for this to be
> recorded as a minor edit. Hmmm? An extra step, yes, but
> less advance thinking is required, and one fewer click to
> remedy forgetting to check the minor edit box. (And in this
> case we dump the $conf['requiresums'].)
I still think there needs to be a way to have people go on adding pages
and changing pages exactly as they do now, with no extra hassle in their
way.
We've had our wiki running for three months, and we're at got 530
pages and a bit over a meg of text in there. That's not a huge wiki by
any stretch of the imagination, but we're at 5,094 changes since
creation, and I don't know how many of those would be "minor" changes
where they'd have an extra dialog getting in the way. Heck, we thought
very carefully about adding an ACL of any sort because that would
require registration, and even now it's only happening because people
are starting to put sensitive information in there -- tracking changes
is a secondary consideration, and one that only really applies to the
aforementioned 'sensitive' pages.
I think there's two sorts of wiki -- mostly static ones, where someone
thinks about the data, puts it in, and then doesn't make changes unless
they have a good reason to do so. For those, it makes sense to make
people enter reasons for changing things, because you want to track what
people are doing, and there's few enough changes that a RSS feed is a
generally useful thing.
Alternatively, for dynamic wikis like ours, a lot of changes may be
small ones. With a dialog, every time I want to add a new page, I'd have
to deal with two dialog boxes; one on the new page, and one on the
'parent' page that I change to add a link to the new one.
I certainly think it would be nice to have the option of adding details
about what I'm changing, but it seems to me that it's the sort of thing
that's much more useful as a batch thing -- I add a few new pages, I add
links to them, then I comment all those changes at once with "documented
Foo process" or whatever. Otherwise, I have to add a link to the parent
page, type "documented Foo process", edit the first new page, type
"documented Foo process", edit the second new page, type "documented Foo
process", etc.
If you have few, large, mostly static pages then presumably you'd only
be editing the one page, and this wouldn't be such a problem -- but
that's not how our wiki is working.
-- dan
--
DokuWiki mailing list - more info at
http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:mailinglist
Other related posts:
