[Pmwiki-users] Why groups?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 12:41:57PM -0600, Christian wrote
> While reading some of it, I wondered why we have groups at all... why
> must  we say that a "group can contain subgroups". Couldn't we instead
> talk  about this as a page having subpages? The pages would then be
> organized as  a tree (or many trees).

Yes, we can discuss it this way.  For the original PmWiki I chose the
word "groups" because UseMod wiki was already using "subpages" to
mean something different than what I was doing, and I felt that
"groups" was a more appropriate term anyway.  In a full hierarchical
system it may indeed make more sense to discuss "pages" and "subpages".
I think I'll try phrasing things that way for a while.

Also, in any discussion of hierarchical pages I think that people
making proposals need to also address the issues of passwords,
permissions, and group (subpage?) headers and footers and not just
assume that they will "just work" the same as in the current model.
For example, what headers/footers get processed by a subpage that
is several levels down a hierarchy?

And, a I have a big comment about having "pages at the top level"--
i.e., pages that aren't in a group or that are not a subpage.  In my early 
experiments with wiki--before I added WikiGroups--one problem I found 
was that authors, especially new authors, don't tend to think in 
terms of how pages should be structured in the long term.  Thus, in
a page+subpage model, a *lot* of pages will tend to be created at the 
root level, because many authors are just going to want to create a
link to "SomeNewPage" without considering if the new page is subordinate
to the current one (in which case the link should be written
./SomeNewPage).  Worse, many authors talking on different topics will
be putting new pages at the root level, so that when it becomes
clear that some sort of page-regrouping is needed, disentangling the sets
of related pages from each other can be a real task.

One might propose simply disallowing page creation at the root level...
but then how does an author create a new "group" (a space in the hierarchy
where authors can attach new subpages)?

BTW, this is exactly the reason why, when creating WikiGroups, I created
a "Main" group rather than letting pages live in a space outside/above
any group.  It was just far easier to say that all pages exist in a 
group, and a group called Main is a default group but is not "superior" 
(in terms of headers, footers, passwords or any sort of hierarchy) to 
other groups.

Pm