wiki
wiki may refer to:
- suggestions / discussion about the indiewebcamp wiki itself.
- page type: the wiki-page as type of page or content
- projects: specific wiki-projects related to indieweb wiki hosting
- wikis: comparing different wiki options for indieweb sites
For details on adding yourself to the IndieWeb wiki, see also wikifying.
Page type
In addition to sequential / time-ordered posts, many in the IndieWebCamp community either want to or already host a wiki or wiki pages on their own personal site.
Wiki pages are typically editable and versioned with visible / easily accessible version history & browsable versions. Wiki pages are often also multi-authored and have a multi-platform interface (like any web-based content hosting solution).
IndieWeb Examples
- Tantek Γelik has a wiki at http://tantek.pbworks.com
- Martijn van der Ven has a wiki at https://wiki.zegnat.net/
- Myles B has a wiki at https://wiki.mylesb.ca/
- Adam Procter has a wiki at https://wiki.adamprocter.co.uk/doku.php
- capjamesg has a new wiki at https://wiki.jamesg.blog/
There are also various wiki hosting sites / silos.
Past Examples
- Tom Morris has his own wiki at http://wiki.tommorris.org/ archived link
- Amber Case had her own wiki at http://caseorganic.com/wiki/ no archive version available
- capjamesg had a wiki on his website. He deprecated the wiki after rarely using it.
Projects
IndieWebCamp projects related to wiki hosting/creation/editing:
- Federated Wiki
- as conceived/created/developed/launched at IndieWebCamp 2011
- MediaWiki
- Used by Tom Morris on wiki.tommorris.org.
See also wiki projects brainstorming.
Wiki Features We Use
At some unlikely point in the far future, we may decide to migrate the wiki off of MediaWiki. If this ever happens, we'll need to be sure whatever replaces it has roughly the same functionality that we use in MediaWiki. Below is a list to collect descriptions of MediaWiki features that we use. Feel free to add to it.
- Wiki-style editing - Click "edit" to view page source and "save" to save changes immediately. Conflicts are not merged automatically, and a message is shown if someone else has edited the page in the mean time.
- Wiki-style links - MediaWiki provides a syntax for quickly linking between wiki pages, e.g. [[events]].
- Nickname templates - We often use sparkline templates to display someone's photo and name in a line of text such as Aaron Parecki. This is done by creating a template with the person's nickname and typing {{aaronpk}} in a line of text.
- Signature on edits - Sometimes we add a signature to lines using ~~~~ which is replaced by the logged-in user's signature and a timestamp.
- Content templates - Several pages (such as events and 2016/Guest_List) use templates to avoid duplicating complicated wiki markup on the page. The templates themselves are wiki pages and are editing by the community.
- IRC notifications - When wiki pages are edited, we get notifications in IRC describing the change.
- The ability to embed HTML in the wiki markup β needed e.g. to add microformats to events
- The ability to upload images, e.g. clicking "embed file" icon inserts wiki link with [[File:Example.jpg]]. Clicking that wiki link takes you to the form to upload the image.
Wiki Features We Need
Sometimes, MediaWiki does not have a good way to do what we want, so we have to hack around it.
- Hotlinked images - We often want to hotlink images to avoid uploading them to the wiki (which is only possible if the image can be CC0 licensed), but we also want to proxy the img src on the resulting page so that the site can be served over https even if the image is http
See also:
- mediawiki-customization for all the things we've had to do to make MediaWiki work for us.
Suggestions
See:
- 2016/newskin for latest work on broader design improvements
Suggestions and bug reports for improving the IndieWeb.org wiki. Please provide suggestions as GitHub issues here:
https://github.com/indieweb/wiki/issues?state=open
Brainstorming
Ideas being iterated rather than a specific suggestion for improvement.
Categorize Pages
Problem statement: If we look at the this-week reports (e.g. 2016-07-29 this week) and summaries of wiki pages that have been edited, it's a long list and doesn't provide a lot of information about why any particular page is important / compared to any other page, or any other way of chunking / understanding the long list.
Thoughts:
- one possibility would be to present each page with an icon in front according to what "type" or "kind" of page it is.
- another possibility is to use such types/kinds to cluster the list of changed pages by type/kind, thus avoiding a need to repeat icons over and over
- either way we could also use the "page icon" or "emojicon" on each page in particular to provide an even more specific graphical hook/representation for easier/quicker understanding of what the pages were about
Approaches:
- Use MediaWiki "Category:" for coarse top level categorization.
- What categories?
- Develop adaptively as needed from looking at "this week" and seeing what patterns (sets of pages) emerge. E.g. from 2016-07-29 this week:
- π event pages for Events + subpages (HWC events), and IWC events /YYYY/city|country
- project pages for specific projects e.g. ikiwiki, WordPress(/*), p3k, relmeauth.php, WhisperFollow, Monocle etc.
- "feature" building blocks (including types of content like album, multi-photo, travel, and UI features like search), other things from IndieMark
- "technology/plumbing" building blocks (like Webmention)
- people (User: pages)
- (anti-)patterns e.g. database-antipattern, js;dr
- silos (GitHub, Google Photos, etc.)
- companies (e.g. Google)
- services (e.g. SubToMe, web hosting, Bridgy, silo.pub)
- history (points of record, e.g. site-deaths, history, timeline, posts about, videos about etc.)
- technologies (in general, like Perl, other languages, frameworks)
- (re-)use rough coarse categories from IndieWebCamp 2014 Year in Review separate lists of pages.
- Develop adaptively as needed from looking at "this week" and seeing what patterns (sets of pages) emerge. E.g. from 2016-07-29 this week:
- Assign a generic icon (or emoji) for each top level category
- What categories?
- Use page-specific page icons or emojicons (both already use templates, so should be automatable) to to customize the icon shown for a page
Done
Suggestions that have been implemented.