[pmwiki-users] Reasons for/against Disabling WikiWords

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Tue Jan 25 19:18:58 CST 2005


On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 12:06:09PM -0800, Wade Hudson wrote:
> I?m considering disabling WikiWords but I?m concerned that doing so
> might deter experienced wiki users from contributing. Otoh, experienced
> wiki users would know how to use a pipe to display a WikiWord.
> 
> One concern of mine is that we will be including the names of many
> websites that use the CamelBack format in the name of their
> organization. Presently, in those instances, I must use [= ? =] to
> prevent forming an undesired link.

Note that you can also use the (`) character to suppress WikiWords --
i.e.:  `CamelBack is basically the same as [=CamelBack=].

> Another concern is that in general, I prefer that the site display
> regular words. They are easier to read and less puzzling to novices who
> suspect that the author made a typo.

After playing with this for a few years now, I don't see anything
wrong with disabling WikiWords and restricting links to the [[...]]
markup.  In versions of PmWiki prior to 2.0 this wasn't that easy to
do (because the link markup was more convoluted), but it's very workable
in 2.0.  In fact, in many ways 2.0 prefers using the explicit link markup,
but continues to support WikiWords by tradition and expectation.

I think there are good arguments for and against WikiWords depending on
a site's purpose and audience.  In your case I think you'd be better
off disabling WikiWords.

One other point that is often overlooked -- one can always configure
PmWiki so that links are only formed if the target page exists...

    $LinkPageCreateFmt = '$LinkText';

With this setting, "PmWiki" and "PmWiki.DocumentationIndex" will still 
become links to the corresponding pages, but "PhD" and "McDonald"
will generally not become links (unless those pages are created
by some other mechanism).  Unfortunately the above also has the
side-effect of getting rid of the edit page link for [[...]] style
links.  It seems to me that the easy answer to this is to provide
an $EnableWikiWordEditLinks option that says whether WikiWords to
non-existent pages should generate edit links or be left alone.
This would give many sites the best of both worlds.

Pm



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