Shortly the physics section of this site will start to appear… once I can find a tool to suit. I’ve been considering starting a physics wiki for a whileand the revision I did over the holidays has convinced me that I need a centralised repository for the information I’m learning/finding.
Yet a couple of things annoy me in particular; one exclusive to wikis and the other a much more general, yet relevant problem.
The wiki problem is the bashedTogetherWordsForLinks they use. Uugh. I hate that. Do any of the wikis do it some other way?
But an even bigger problem is data lock-in. Assuming that I write some decent stuff in the wiki, I’m going to want to share it, print it, heck maybe even distribute it. Which means PDF export or similar. Especially if a wiki is to be used as a collaborative writing tool, this is very important. For example, I was planning to collaborate with a couple of people to write a booklet. Now while we oculd all hack it around in Microsoft Word or similar, why not use a web-based tool, and then allow people to browse it while we write (and correct the mistakes)? That hasn’t happend so far - because I couldn’t find the software to do it.
And this seems to be a general problem across most web-based software. People are collecting together so much information and knowledge, yet I see it running into the same problem as the “Digital Domesday Book”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2534391.stm. Although the data will still be readable, it will be in the wrong format, and therefore useless without much work to extract it. And 20 years on it might not be readable.
We need to look forwards while considering data management. Otherwise we might as well not bother to compile and store any information digitally, if it’s going to be lost. It is mainly for this reason that I don’t see paper publications disappearing in the next 30 years.
Yet again I’m asking for suggestions and moaning. Hopefully soon I’ll write some more interesting content in this weblog - like the solutions to the above problems 
2 comments ↓
Checkout the wiki tool at http://www.tikiwiki.org - one of the features is the ability to create on the fly a PDF from a selected group of pages.
In relation to the camel-case convention for links, not all wikis use this (for example MediaWiki), and even the ones that do offer a syntax to allow you to create page links from non-camelcase (usually by putting some form of brackets around the words to form the link)
regards
Julian
You might also want to look at PEAR::Text_Wiki - http://pear.php.net/package/Text_Wiki
“Abstracts parsing and rendering rules for Wiki markup in structured plain text.”
In other words, you can use different types of Wiki markup (may even be BBCode support now).
Leave a Comment