User:AaronPeterson

Hello,

I'm Aaron Peterson

 MrDarkUser on IRC
 509.332.7697  (Pullman, WA USA)
 ICQ 2302806

 1220 NE Myrtle St
 Pullman WA 99163

 My favorite email gets: incinerated at yahoo
 (you can add the dot com)

Wiki Experience

Operator of: http://escargot.icehouse.net/mediawiki
Major Contributor to: http://www.subverted.net/wakka
Contributor and Basher of: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org
I rearranged the fresco wiki.. http://wiki.fresco.org

Wiki Goals

And, I am starting a project called Fractodendron, which aims to create, or encourage development of a distributed P2P server system for the masses. (my projects are at my wiki, linked to above)

I am planning to base my project on a wiki, and I should know the wiki very well, and make sure that others can use it very well too.

Wiki Habits

I have been a lone wikier, and have little experience working with others. I have some of my own terminology, and have spend many, many hours thinking about wikis. I am used to being unopposed, however, I believe that I am naturally well tempered, but I may speak harshly or crudely when positioned in a WikiWar. I will, however, at the same time be considering what I can consede.

I don't really care for spending lots of time correcting spelling. I will use Konqueror for it's spell checker if need be. (even though it's always loading pages from URLs in the clipboard, and poping up invalid URL messages)

I tend to view many things as being relaited, even when others don't. I would prefer to be given a chance, as I can explain the connection, or subtleties of meaning.

I always attempt to find a place for content on the web site, and or keep content live on another page. (however I finally learned that one should click on the date in the page history to view the older version of the page... and this isn't as important for me now) however, live pages are more respectfull to a previous author.

I try to develop new versions of high trafic pages on a prototype page, then make the move in one quick move, with the old site a wikilink away.

Wiki Philosophy

My philosophy doesn't entirely match those of wikimedia's contributers, however, we seem to be working ok together.

I have done some edits, like moved the full file list to it's own page, because I thought it was too long. I sorta waffled on this item, but... onto my philosophy:

Page length

A wiki article for knowledge bases shouldn't be more than 3 printed pages long.

A wiki article for an encylopedia page... shouldn't be much longer.

There should be lots of pages, with little duplication. This gets inconvienient when one wishes to print an entire procedure, or guide book, so I have listed in my desired features a mechanism to take care of this common problem.

Speed

Wikis should be very quick to navigate, and to develop. I mostly don't want to care about server speed... so I'm interested in creating a P2P wiki system that aleviates this problem.

Apropriateness of Wikis

I believe that a wiki should be able to take the role of CMS software, and all the other things mediawiki is listed as not being, as listed in Wiki uses

Case insensitivity

I am constantly bothered by wikimedia's case sensitivity. I think that it was choses out of development ease, and should be reserved for certain namespaces.

namespaces

I think all articles should start in the main namespace, and get moved as neccissary to the "appropriate" namespace when needed. disambiguation pages are not bad things.

Most Desired Features

Case insensitivity
BackLinks
newline as newline
collapsing text boxes -- so a summary can be shown all the time, and a detailed explanation can be expanded -- like the table of contents feature.. but more integrated.
customizable wikitags -- I want to have a few be "user defined", maybe based on category. or a howto to hack a few that I don't use
page ordering -- a list of links, on one page should be able to serve as a "seed" for creating a previous and next button, for documentation, and long lists.
nested categories -- categories are great, but one should be able to list under another one, as there are nearly as many possible categories as there are artilces... my convention of using backlinks is more scalable though...
BackLinks with exclusion possibility is can take care of nested category problems.