[uf-discuss] Re: Thoughts on MF & Wiki

[Chris Messina]

On 3/27/06, David Weekly <david at weekly.org> wrote:
> > Take: "We're meeting at Gordon Biersch at 10:30 tomorrow - be there!"
> >
> > Change to: We're meeting at
> > [Event: Gordon Biersch at 10:30 tomorrow] - be there!"
>
> Well, we'd have to rewrite "tomorrow" to a date when the original
> submitter posted. Otherwise, suppose the next day someone updated some
> *other* part of the page. Would the date for the event change? If not,
> what if someone updated the page the next day and *did* want to
> indicate the next day? So relative dates break down in a wiki context.

Well, it would trigger an "on-create action". So the first time you
link to something using [Event: $] and specify a relative date, it
would set the date to a time relative to that onsave event. If you
edit the event after that, well, we'll have to figure out the most
sensible way to handle changes.

David, FYI, we handle relative dates like this:

<abbr title="GMT-DATE">tomorrow</abbr>


> > What do you think about that general method? There's instant benefit
> > (the text would be added to a calendar of some sort, some processing
> > might occur, and it's added to a list that can be gardened later)?
>
> This is getting more plausible. The point of a wiki is to be
> incredibly flexible / lazy. The looser and sloppier we can make
> sticking in data (but get *some* structured info out of it) the
> better. Asking to change user habits will probably be a losing battle.

Absolutely. I think that doing something like a "distributed macro"
that operates over time (create the preconditions for semanticization
of content) and then make it possible for people to garden after the
fact... is the answer for wikis.

So I can use the [Event: $] or [Person: $] linking method but not do
anything else. Other people can then return to edit or add information
to that object later because the preconditions exist for their help.

This follows the current use of wikis anyway -- and if we can use that
windowing code to pull in external data on the fly, we can make it
super easy to garden the wiki...!

Chris