CategoryWikiDesignPatterns

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In spite of the fact that the c2.com Wiki was established to discuss Wiki:PatternLanguage, that site and this one have not had a real deep analysis of the nature of Wiki.

These are pages that take a formal approach to looking at the Design Patterns of Wiki itself.

A good place to start is CheapAndEasyCollaboration.

There is also some commentary on the whole category at WikiDesignPatternsDiscussion

There is an alternative WikiPatternLanguage, that is not centered on technical issues.

Discussion

But it is a start of one -- why delete?

Maybe your problem is that of DesignPattern? vs UsagePattern?. SandBoxPattern is a UsagePattern?, but SimpleTextFormatting is a DesignPattern?.

-- ChristopherAllen

Christopher, I'm sorry if I have hurt your feelings. I saw no contributions from you for a long time, so I thought you had lost interest and moved on. If you want, I will restore the category to its former state (it had about 8 pages I think) and discuss things in detail.

I think that if you look at the design patterns you specified and look at it deeply, you will feel yourself that we gained nothing from putting these into pattern form. The separation in character and paragraph formatting doesn't help, because these aren't patterns that interact and form a system. Part of them aren't even essential to wiki, for wiki would work just as well if we used <b>..</b>, <i>...</i>, <hr> or <h2>...</h2>. When you started your work a year ago, nobody knew better. It was a bold try in a scientific spirit - and Sunir was right to award you a BarnStar for that - but it turned into a dead end. A valuable failure on which we can now try to build another WikiPatternLanguage which spans the whole spectrum from the very small to the very large phenomena. It may contain technical patterns at some point, but I've avoided that for now because I think it would let us fall into the same trap - not seeing the forest for the trees. But what seems clear to me, needn't be clear to you or others and I don't want to force a shortcut on anyone. -- HelmutLeitner

I don't want to discourage you from finding your own patterns. I just feel there are more then one way of looking for them, one of which is to look at the different design choices that different developers made, and try to understand why they chose them over the other choices.

You are right that I've not been as active on Meatball lately. Some of my work has gone into my blog -- you might enjoy http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/08/intimacy_gradie.html . I've have also added some stuff recently to WikiFeatures, such as http://wikifeatures.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/DifferentExternalLinks. In this specific case I've been trying to understand the design tensions around marking external links differently from internal links (or interwiki links). It isn't quite ready for a DesignPattern? yet, but looking at the design different choices there (see the illustrations) has made me think deeper about it. -- ChristopherAllen

I'll restore the category. I wouldn't have deleted it, if I had known that you are still working on it. -- HelmutLeitner

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