MinimalWikiRequirements
Based on a conversation with RadomirDopieralski on #oddmuse, I think the following are important properties of a usable wiki:
RadomirDopieralski
- A list of recent changes. Without recent changes, no peer review, no way of keeping up.
- Either KeptPages or a complete revision history is a must. The last two versions or no old versions makes rollbacks impossible.
- The abilities to diff are important. How else will you evaluate changes?
- Links to diff and history from the list of recent changes are important usability elements for me. Recent changes is where peer review happens.
- I also hate it when page content and diff are not on the same page. It makes evaluating a diff unnecessarily difficult. (I would have loved inline diff, with a way to jump to the next change, but it was too hard a problem to solve for me at the time.)
- The ability to contact the author of a change via link on recent changes or history page is also important. If you disagree with ongoing changes, you feel frustrated if you cannot tell the user about it.
- Making IP numbers available to readers is important, unless you allow only verified accounts.
- These days, a public wiki needs the ability to defend itself against spam.
Comments
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
The standard HTML structure available from TextFormattingRules is also useful (strong, emphasis, lists, definition lists, anchors, hyperlinks, preformatted and headings). Colors, background images, animated icons, AJAX, Web 2.0, are all overkill. 😄
– AaronHawley 2007-03-21 20:38 UTC
AaronHawley
---
I agree, that they are useful. But I was trying to list the things I consider to be essential for a social site. I’ve been inspired by forums and the twisted Flickr site which is structurally similar to forums. And I noted:
- Easy linking is nice, but Flickr requires HTML links (`<a href="...">bla</a>`), and people still use it.
- All forms of emphasis and lists are also nice to have, but one of the forums I regularly use has an ugly syntax (`[LIST] [*] foo [*] bar [/LIST]`) and therefore people rarely use it. In the forum, the only thing that is used a lot, and which is inserted automatically, is markup for quoting previous posts.
That’s why I concluded that these kinds of features don’t belong on MinimalWikiRequirements. I do agree, however, that they make excellent features.
MinimalWikiRequirements
– Alex Schroeder 2007-03-22 09:31 UTC
Alex Schroeder
---
Interesting. Plain HTML.
Additinally, having no markup rules has the benefit of allowing Wiki pages to automatically inherit the improvements introduced in Web browsers.
– AaronHawley 2007-03-22 14:57 UTC
AaronHawley
---
I also find myself using paste and copy to copy page titles when linking if the page title in question contains spaces. Consider typing the following link: `[[2007-03-12 Back from Montana]]`. It seems to me that there is some kind of threshold for page name length beyond which people will no longer have any use for “easy linking” markup.
– Alex Schroeder 2007-03-22 15:33 UTC
Alex Schroeder