Prospects
- What and Why
- Prospects
  - Digital Hoard Management
  - WikiWare

Prospects

What and Why

There are topics and ideas that occur to me that I'd like to keep notes on. Oddly, and to my disappointment, it is not so easy to do that in a wiki.

For instance, the ways to add a new page in this wiki ¹⁾ are

editing an existing page to add a link to the page-to-be, saving, clicking on the link, and answering “yes” to the do-you-want-to-create-this-page question;
typing the path and name of the page-to-be in the URL field of the browser, requesting the URL, then answering “yes” to the do-you-want-to-create-this-page question.

I would like to be able to just add a page as I would a content list, like a blog post or annotated URL post.

Having created lots of pages in the second manner, I've made a lot of orphan pages ²⁾ on this blog. Some of them I've tried to make less isolated by adding their contact info to Twigs.

In a way, this page is just another twigs page but it is meant to be used for the first manner of page-adding as a default place to add links before creation, not just for gathering orphans after the fact.

Prospects

Digital Hoard Management

How many copies of my photos and various other content do I have, and where are they? What might I want to eliminate? What might I want to keep an additional replica of, and where might I keep that replica? How will I know where things are when I went to use them again?

A key tool, I suspect, is to supplement my human memory with a catalog, probably digital as well.

Actually, I've already begun cataloguing, but would like to increase my coverage to make sure at least all the things I value that have only a digital existence are included. I've catalogued my physical books with LibraryThing, and catalogued some of the journal articles I've acquired (legally, as a student or alumnus for the most part) with Zotero. But which of my photos are where?

WikiWare

There are several features lacking in this site's management software. An idealized redesign is a first step in toward a system better suited to my needs. The features are mostly in contributor empowerment: make it possible, as one composes a page, to set the access control³⁾ parameters of the material. Another is content fission, to be able to split a page into two or more smaller pages, which might then each expand. Off-line editing would be nice; wiki mark-up is easy to use in a basic editor, but the resulting files cannot just be uploaded (like other media, photos and such), the text has to be copied and pasted into the web editor.

¹⁾ and I'm not naming the Dokuwiki application because, as far as my experience with various wiki software has taken me, this is standard procedure

²⁾ and possibly page clusters, pages linked only to each other and not to the main graph of pages

³⁾ Access control parameters list users and user groups who should be allowed to read, read and modify, delete, or create new pages of content. A user empowered system will take some thought, because I would not want it to be possible for another user to remove an author's access to her own product! This problem also come up in the collaborative editing of genealogical information, for instance.