[pmwiki-users] Is 'Page Creator' worth to discuss?

marc gmane at auxbuss.com
Fri Feb 22 08:58:24 CST 2008


Peter & Melodye Bowers said...
> > My view on this is that it should not be part of PmWiki's core, but a
> > recipe for those that really need it - although I think they should
> > fight it long and hard.
> > 
> > As an aside, the original author can always be derived from action=diff.
> > In this case, at least it's in context to the changes that follow. And
> > if you use expirediff, as I do, I would argue that you are not
> > interested in a page's history - at least, beyond some point.
> > 
> > To my way of thinking, page ownership should be kept to the bare
> > minimum. The idea that x remains the "creator" of a page is anathema,
> > and counter to wiki philosophy of 'freedom to edit'.
> 
> It comes down to 2 issues: philosophical and technical.

It's more than his. You might believe something until you learn a new 
fact. So, what might loosely be deemed a philosophical position is, in 
actuality, one of being better appraised or educated.

> Technically the issue seems very simple.

Indeed.

> Not just implementation, but the decision whether to implement.

No, no; you can't conjoin these; they are very different.

> If someone has need for cauthor in their
> specific requirements and it is a recipe then there are large technical
> issues of deriving it from data that may or may not be available (i.e., may
> have expired before the requirement became known).  Adding a couple lines of
> code to the core and a 10-15 byte overhead in each pagefile leaves the
> administrator the decision of whether and how to use it.  Not having it in
> core means that the technical issues continue ad infinitum for those who
> truly have the requirement for it.

This sounds like the "for your own security" arguments that our 
governments keep beating us over the head with ;-)

But seriously, as a proponent of agile development, I am opposed to 
developing functionality that "we might need one day"; whether code or 
data. Once you start down that road, where do you stop?

No. If one day you decide that you really, truly need functionality, 
then that is the time to add it.

> If we were trying to change something about the role/responsibility of the
> cauthor then that belongs in a recipe.  But making the data available seems
> to me to clearly belong in the core...

I believe that it is clearly a recipe.

One of the issues I have when introducing a wiki in a business is the 
issue of "ownership". A lot of folk are wedded to the idea of ownership 
of information - for a bunch of reasons that don't bare retelling here - 
and it can take months for the diehards to relinquish this redundant 
concept. (And with PmWiki we can effectively enforce ownership via 
authuser and permissions, in any case.)

Key to educating these folk is the idea that information on a wiki is 
owned by the group; there is no creator, there is no owner, there's just 
a shared pool of information that will grow and be updated over time.

Once the penny has dropped, the issue never raises its head. One 
indication that the bridge has finally been crossed is when folk start 
collaborating on a "document" by using the wiki.

Add a /permanent/ "created by Fred" tag to every page regresses this 
progress at a stroke.

For example, a common idiom I see is for someone in a group to create a 
holding page to which they add ToDo category markup. The "creator" is 
random and the storage of that information is useless.

It's a recipe; the more I think about it; 100% a recipe.

-- 
Cheers,
Marc




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