On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 11:14:59AM +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
You know, changing a wiki page title means breaking all links to that page from other sites. So, changing an old page title, means taking that page off the Net.
Not if the redirect is done, certainly wikipedia does this.
I must confess I did not know about this redirect stuff, and I apologize for that. I did not want to insinuate that changing the page title was done with the intent of taking that page off the Net, either. I thought it was only an unintended by product of the renaming.
Clearly something here has violated the "be friendly" policy which I think is the most important policy that governs all wiki/IRC/mailing list stuff. If something as simple as a redirect can solve it all, then great.
I don't think you are right on this point. I do not think that what happened to me is due to some kind of personal problem. I think that the person I had some problem with, did so because he perceived that in doing so he was improving the wiki. And he is probably right. This is why I addressed the issue openly. I think it's a problem of wiki management. Producing wiki content is a difficult task, not much less than writing good software. It takes time, and you get no public recognition - yes, you can sign the page but the reader doesn't perceive he's using it as it would with a piece of code. In other words, you must be double motivated to write wiki content like a long tutorial. Sometimes you write it for teaching people how to use your software, indeed. You must be very careful with rising the level of entrance with guidelines and other rules. And if you do that, you must be very careful not to use those rules in a way that is perceived as unmotivated. It turned out that one of the rules that was applied to me was wrongly applied. And it was wrongly applied because no attention to the content I was writing had been paid. And I had to invest time to get the problem sorted out. Now, having people messing with the content you are providing, without paying attention to it, just to have it conformed to some stylistic guidelines is just what pisses the author off. Am I right? Why not using this energy to help the author with the content itself. Isn't this *the* wiki way? I'm asking because I invested time in wiki technologies myself. I was the author of a wiki - UniWakka it was called - and I had to face wiki management issues too. I do believe that some kind of style should be imposed by the software itself, without any more guidelines. Some lack of uniformity may be the price to be paid to have a leaving, ever growing wiki. If you want a nice looking web site, well, stay away from wikis. But this is a topic we can discuss if someone has some interest in it. Thanks for your kind attention. Andrea