Thoughts on 'Special' Wiki Pages

The wiki, all wikis, have a few 'special' pages -- Recent Changes, auto-generated indexes and the like. I've been thinking about how handy they are, and had some ideas on how to expand on the concept. Specifically, editable 'special' pages.

Following are two examples:

• images. This and some other wikis support inline images. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to 'edit' the image like you edit a page? I'm not talking about a drawing or painting program. Rather, when you 'edit' an image you get a form where you can submit a static file that overwrites the existing image, much as the text in a regular page gets overwritten when you save a page. This would allow one to add ad hoc images to a wiki instead of having to reference external images.
• a calendar page. When you view it, it looks like a calendar. Day boxes would have appointments, events, whatever. But when you edit it it's not WYSIWYG. Rather, it's a list of dates and events.

The whole idea of the wiki is to be able to create content easily, and without a lot of formatting fuss. These two ideas seem to fall readily into that category, even though they sort-of break the mold of quasi-wysiwyg formatting of traditional pages.

Comments?

MHo: Very good ideas! See New features requested for wiki, where I noted the same idea as you (image-serving). The Calender-Page (you mean something like [L1 ]) is another very useful idea; why not take it to the next abstraction level: it would be nice to have additional special pages which are e.g. included in the generated page head, at the top or bot or whatever. Those pages could then contain javascripts .e.g. and they should not neccessarily being editable by users but admins.

See also What Would You Change about the Wiki

--Bryan Oakley

DKF: For calendaring, I'd just use Google Calendar[L2 ]. It seems daft to me to develop a competing piece of software that would take loads of effort to even approach in general usability.

On the other hand, the problem with allowing non-text media upload is that it is very easy to abuse.