Re: Wiki citations

In addition to Tom's points about the page history, I'd like to suggest a
few protocols for editing wiki documents:

1. Rather than emailing changes to the list as a general practice, I'm
inclined to think that this should only be done when the person making the
change thinks the change warrants further discussion on the list.
Non-controversial changes (previously discussed?) or changes that might be
of interest only to the editors (spelling, formatting, minor corrections)
can be handled by the wiki's automatic change notification mechanism. If the
editors see that a change was made that isn't as trivial as the changer
thought, it's easy enough for them to forward the change to the rest of the
list.

2. Anyone interested in being notified of changes to a page should subscribe
to it -- the "subscribe" link is at the top and bottom of the page next to
the edit link. You'll receive an email showing the changes each time the
page is changed. If you're interested in seeing "trivial" changes, you may
select that option in your wiki UserPreferences page. The pages you're
subscribed to are listed in your UserPreferences page toward the bottom and
you can edit that list directly using Regex parameters to be notified of a
range of pages.

3. To receive general notifications of changes to any page in the wiki, you
can subscribe to the RecentChanges page or grab the rss feed:
http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/RecentChanges?action=rss_rc&ddiffs=1&unique=1

4. When you edit a document, it's a good idea to add a this-edit-specific
comment for the enlightenment of people viewing the change in the page
history. The comment box is just under the editing textarea and above the
preview window. Each comment entered is specifically related to the change
that you're making rather than the page as a whole.

5. If you'd like to leave comments for the editors related to a specific
edit or section of text, you can leave a one-line comment directly in the
text by inserting a "##comment" page processing directive like this:
##comment --enter your text here
Then add a comment in the page-level edit comment that you inserted inline
comments
Comments inserted in this way won't appear in the displayed page and can
only be viewed by people with edit privileges.

6. You can enter public comments by using the footnote macro:
[[FootNote(enter footnote text between parens)]]
The contents of the footnote will appear at the bottom of the page.

7. Please preview your edit before you save it. This will help minimize the
number of changes in the change history.

8. It would be nice if page editors could feel free to undo your changes
without feeling obligated to explain why. Whether an editor actually does
this or not is up to the individual, but it would be good if nobody really
expected an explanation and it would be really nice if no offense was taken
when none was given.

There's an excellent editing reference here:
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/SyntaxReference

Cheers,

Jon


On 11/28/06, Thomas Baker <baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 03:34:53PM +0100, Antoine Isaac wrote:
> > >The editors have yet to establish a documentation workflow, but this
> > >being a wiki, I'd like to suggest that anyone (not just the editors)
> > >who would like to tweak this further before it's accepted should feel
> > >free to edit this page directly.
> >
> > Here I would object, at least regarding important modifications.
> > Not that I'm afraid of having my stuff removed without my approval (I
> > save the wiki pages on my hd, so I can re-post them whenever I like ;-)
>
> No need to fall back on your own copies -- the wiki also keeps track of
> recent versions :-)  On any page, click on the "Info" button to see
> versioning information, e.g.:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/UCFormat?action=info [*]
>
> > but rather because I want to be sure that every significant
> > comment/modification there will be motivated by some mail on the list
> > (or just to us), which might not be the case if we let anyone tweaking
> > the wiki and then say "look, here are my changes".
>
> I agree that the etiquette should be: no "significant" ("substantial")
> changes without a note to the editors or to the list.  However it is easy
> to view the differences between any two versions on the "Info" page -- e.g
> .,
> the differences between Antoine's last edit and Jon's first:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/UCFormat?action=diff&rev2=3&rev1=2 [*]
>
> Note, too, that differences are _citable_, so could be referenced in
> postings to the list.
>
> Everyone, I would be interested to know whether any of your mail clients
> are damaging
> the URLs above [*] to make them unclickable.
>
> >                                                    For example, it might
> > have been wiser for me also to send the snapshot to the WG mailing list,
> > which I'll do right now.
>
> I would suggest including the text of important passages in WG mailing
> list postings so that people can quote it in replies.
>
> Let's discuss in the call...
>
> Tom
>
> --
> Tom Baker - tbaker@tbaker.de - baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de
>
>


-- 
Jon