Version 4 of Cleaning up pages on this wiki

Updated 2006-02-01 15:05:47 by jcw

There are many thousands of pages on this wiki, each with a unique title.

When creating new pages, keep the following in mind:

  • pages can not easily be renamed (well... see below)
  • pages are cheap, dirt cheap, feel free to split pages up
  • empty pages are cheap too - feel free to move content and clear the old page

CHOOSE PAGE TITLES WISELY

Apart from chronological order in page numbering, a wiki really has no start or end. People are bound to enter it from every conceivable angle, via search, URL references, and browsing. Reaching a page called "My app" on this wiki will probably confuse almost anyone, probably best not to pick such a page title.

In essence, you'll need to walk a fine line between assuming too much context and being too verbose. Perhaps this helps:

  • when choosing a page title, assume people are coming from some other web site and expect a Tcl-related page
  • do not assume they come from some specific page, don't pick titles like "Example 1", "Next step", and so on

CLEANING UP PAGE TITLES

Pages never disappear completely from this wiki once created. Combined with the fact that pages can not easily be renamed, the only way to fix or alter a page is to copy its contents to a new one with the correct title.

Having said that, you can easily make a page become unnoticed:

  • remove all other references to the page on this wiki
  • i.e. when renaming, adjust all references to the page

Once all references are gone, the page title will stop being a hyperlink and will (on most browsers) become black.


CLEANING UP PAGE CONTENTS

Feel free to move pages around, split long pages up, and move obsolete content to pages with a proper title ("Old discussion about vwait", etc).

Removing content which is not absolutely totally blatantly outdated or clearly offensive is usually frowned upon in wiki-land. While a lot of contributions are unfortunately anonymous, people might resent seeing stuff deleted which is at best perhaps merely disagreeable to some.

But yes, you can remove content, that's what wiki's allow after all. There is always the revisions link at the bottom of each page to find deleted content back (every change is recorded there once a day).

And there is a way to make a page essentially gone: replace its contents by a single space. When there are no more references to the page and its contents is one space, it will cease to be a hyperlink on the Recent Changes page. After a week or so, it will have dropped off the Recent Changes page, at which point very few people will ever bump into it again (it will no longer show up in searches either).


RENAMING PAGE TITLES

While the web interface has no way to rename pages, the Tk interface does allow this. So if you have your own wikit set up, you can run it with Tk and rename as needed - referencing pages will also be adjusted.

In the case of this Tcler's Wiki, if there is a page which needs to be renamed (an obvious typo, say), send me an email with the page number and I'll can do it for you (long live SSH X11 forwarding!).

Feel free to add more tips -jcw


Category Wikit