UnGood

[learnedax]

You know, default WikiStyle really annoys me. Using it for most purposes results in forced intercapping, e.g. ManageMent, which is usually both ugly and confusing. But at least that can be avoided with [[bracketing stuff]], so you are not required (just highly encouraged) to use the WikiStandard of GoodStyle (which is a pretty 1984 way of putting it, anyway). The worse problem is that when it's used for things that are already intercapped, like ClassName, it automatically creates dead links for you. You often don't want to create a new WikiPage any time you mention an object or method, so you have to then specially mark it up to prevent parsing as a WikiLink.

I have now run into several cases of annoying kludges in both directions, which makes me wonder who thought this system made any GoodSense in the first place?

Comments

[dsrtao]

First off, I've discovered that the people who both benefit from and take to a Wiki fastest are the just-competent users -- the ones who use computers as a tool, are willing to learn something to get their job done, but aren't interested in anything beyond that. To them, BiCap links are a hell of a lot more digestible than "create an URL and go edit that file".

Second, you (not you, but somebody) *do* want to have a WikiLink for each object or method. If you're putting code in your Wiki, it's for documentation purposes. (If you want source code repositories, CVS is over there and Subversion is over thataway...) A great way of documenting your code is to have it all hyperlinked to its descriptions.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

you (not you, but somebody) *do* want to have a WikiLink for each object or method

Frequently that is true. The specific case that just made me think of this was one where code was not being documented, but rather referenced in minutes of a meeting. The notetaker wrote something like "this should be handled in FooClass" and thus got left with a dead link.

There are also cases where your documentation refers to, say, JLabel, which you are not responsible for documenting. The best thing might be to make a new page for each such reference that redirects to Sun's pages, but that's a huge amount of added work.

(Actually, the best thing there is to use Javadoc and not Wiki, but it's just an example.)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

(Actually, we're locked into solutions for code repositories, and they ain't svn or cvs...)

But Java already has Javadoc, so having it documented in a wiki seems like redundancy, which is Bad because then you'll have inconsistency. Smarter would be a wiki that understood [[Java:com.company.foo.MyClass]] and put the right link in, i.e., one to the automatically-generated-and-updated javadoc.

I've never seen false intercaps used (ManageMent) -- to me that would be Wrong, because it implies something called "Manage Ment", and then I'd want you to explain what Ment is and how you manage it. (And yes, you can [no-wiki] a StudlyCapped word if you don't want it to be linked, and yes, it's a PITA.)

But TheOneTrueWikiLinkStyle is a big argument; go hit c2.com and other "original" wikis for more discussion of it.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Yeah, pretty much the first thing I had to do when setting up a wiki was figure out how to bypass the stupid StudlyCaps=links rule. I was using kwiki, so I couldn't even do multiword links.

I really like how Everything2 does it (HTML without external references, internal references being []ed), but I wouldn't mind using a wiki that does [[]]s.