Vote -- Community curated TiddlyWiki editions: First steps

[Scott_Sauyet]

@TW_Tones

But we could also provide components as options and have build to order wikis.

Your demonstration of this was very powerful. I think it would be an extremely useful tool. But I think it’s a different effort from what the OP (and the preceding thread) are about. I think of this as providing ready-made starter editions for those not yet interested in doing much tinkering. Your suggestion—and a similar one from Justin_H—are more about providing tools for those ready to do some tinkering. They are complementary, but very distinct, efforts. I’d love to see both proceed, but I believe it would make sense to keep them separate.

(That last is not entirely true. It’s possible that a robust version of your tool is how we’d store and present the versions discussed here. And these versions might be some of the basic edition used inside your tool. But that would be later in the game. For the moment, I think these should evolve independently.)

[TW_Tones]

Please suspend judgement a little longer. What users see as editions available to them and the ability to acquire them can be very different to each other, Editions can be found elsewhere (more than one place according to the audience need).

• On the builder site we could have a package that defines what is needed to generate a public edition. This does not mean users see how the sausages are made.
  • In fact I like the idea of first making editions available in tiddlyhost which are public and can be used to generate another tiddlyhost site in place, or download the site and make it your own local wiki.

The advantage if we were to encourage editions to pass through this sausage maker on the way to publishing include;

• All changes to an empty html to make the edition need to be spelt out, thus can also be found, reproduced and changed.
• We can add a version control layer for editions published so editions in the wild can be compared with the latest.
• We may be able to generate update packages to migrate vn published edition to vn+1
• It is easy in the sausage machine, when tiddlywiki updates, or key plugins do, to regenerate the edition with these changes and do an in wiki test before releasing a new edition version.

Basically when someone creates a public edition they not only share the final result but the steps taken to produce that result, and they truly give it to the community, so others can then maintain currency as new versions of tiddlywiki are released etc…

• This may even provide a mechanism where we can in future migrate published editions into say tiddlywiki 6.x
• Someone with knowledge of the transition from 5.x to 6.x will have a platform on which to apply this knowledge to multiple editions, keeping even aged ones alive.

A welcome side effect would be more experienced and knowledgeable users can also generate a community edition with there Favorite plugins and customisations very easily.

• I could Imagin an edition of the one I demonstrate with projectify could include features that I and at least one other user, who have tinkered with heavily would be available.

@Springer

There is considerable labor involved in developing and refining a good TiddlyWiki (with actual workflow efficiency tested and tweaked through “living in” the solution), and some of these model ideas demand real-world familiarity with a particular domain. So, I think it doesn’t make sense to build most of these “from the ground up” just as demos.

• This is where I think the sausage maker approach could reduce the effort involved.

If we have one or more sausage makers, we can expend the effort also on providing a submission process, users go to the sausage maker and define and test, or modify an edition then send a json file of changes to the administrator, who imports, tests and if it passes, publishes the edition. Then updates the various sources.

• We could also include a collection of demo data that can be optionally added to one or more editions

[CodaCoder]

Agree, completely. Perhaps it wasn’t clear enough for some. The point behind my “car” analogy (and your elaboration of it) was… WE suffer from the curse of knowledge. It’s quite hard for us to step back and just see the “skin”.

I don’t think this is about laying out wares on a market stall and making them look as fantastic as possible and littering them with metaphorical “LOOK HERE!” slogans and the like. It’s in the title: First steps.

We’d do better to focus on purpose, and KISS.

[vilc]

@TW_Tones

when someone creates a public edition they not only share the final result but the steps taken to produce that result

This transparency is very important imo, both for end users (so they can see what exactly they are working with, if they care) and for us if we’re going to cooperate on creating them. I would very much advocate for all the editions we create to consist of plugins only, without any “loose” modifications.

But I think kinda same what @Scott_Sauyet said above. I think right now the system you propose would be an overkill for drafting just a handful of editions, although it might turn beneficial in the long run. But for now, I think we could decide on a couple (3–5 or so) of editions and try to create them, if applicable basing on some existing ones. If we run into trouble managing that, then we go back and create a robust environment for that first.

[TW_Tones]

@vilc

I would very much advocate for all the editions we create to consist of plugins only, without any “loose” modifications.

• The only thing I would add, is they do not need to be actual plugins but can be a package, or buindle of tiddlers in a JSON tiddler as well.
• But yes, no loose or unknowen changes, the are ways to find them.

@vilc

But for now, I think we could decide on a couple (3–5 or so) of editions and try to create them

• Of course, future thinking is helpful for the present as well, but the future should not be a pre-requisite for now.
• However if I am to create these editions myself, based on information people provide, I would personally like to use my sausage maker. Even if you never see how it was made.
  • That is why I called it a “sausage maker” how the sausage gets made - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Sausage machine futures;

• I have found an easy to use method to add tiddlers including plugins to an edition we can generate in an innerwiki.
  • I have done a POC to achieve the following, it will use the below information to generate the edition in the inner wiki.
• Drag and drop a tiddler title on an innerwiki tiddler, it creates a fieldname of that title eg; $:/plugins/flibbles/relink and will including it in the inner wiki
• Edit the fieldname and give it an alternate title eg $:/plugins/sq/editor-autolist value $:/plugins/PSaT/editor-autolist it will include in the inner wiki the second tiddler named as the first tiddler.
• Alternatively edit the fieldname and give is a specific value, not an existing tiddler and it will create that tiddler with the text field set to the value eg; “$:/config/design-mode” value = yes.

Give me a list of ingredients and I will make a sausage or edition for you.

[Springer]

@Scott_Sauyet

One perhaps useful technique would be for us to use something familiar for each example. Perhaps a novel-prep wiki would be as if it were from Lewis Carol as he writes Alice in Wonderland (has the advantage of being public domain.) And academic article might be a famous one from Kant—care to help with that @Springer? —or Einstein.

@Scott_Sauyet The suggestion that Kant might be a familiar example (even for most academics) is pretty hilarious. As you know, I do love the idea of exhibiting some wikis in which the familiarity of the content helps to make the affordances intuitive and satisfying. The Periodic Table demo does that very well, even though it doesn’t easily generalize to other domains. And I recognize that the PT demo was a project that you completed not so much because you needed the PT resource, but in order to illustrate TiddlyWiki’s power in a neat and well-defined familiar domain. The value of that effort is all the more praiseworthy for that!

For my part, in the absence of some other immediate interest, I would not be close to signing up to animate Kant, or any other existing philosophical system, with a TiddlyWiki project. The work would be much more conceptual, involving careful wordsmithing and delicate interpretive decisions (and unlike the decisions you made in curating the PT, the sweat put into the details would not register for most of those who see it).

I do, however, have my course-related wikis, and since I really am invested in these, I can imagine developing variants to share as stripped-down models.

Hm… I actually do have a couple wikis that are like garden-tours through favorite texts — freelinked cats-cradle formations, where every tiddler shows a short passage associated with its titular keyword (with marginal commentary), and any other keyword within that passage is lit up as a link to its own “home” passage. Not many texts support this dense kind of … “intertwingularity” (is that the word I associate with @Charlie_Veniot?). Perhaps I’ll see about offering something along those lines as a demo wiki, though the ones I currently have would violate copyright if I published them openly on the web.

[Charlie_Veniot]

@Springer

“intertwingularity” (is that the word I associate with @Charlie_Veniot?

That’s one of my favourite words, coined by Ted Nelson: (Intertwingularity - Wikipedia)

Derived from that is a word that I coined, something I constantly suffer from: intertwingulitis.

And that’s where TiddlyWiki comes in: it is an intertwingularity mapping champ.

[Scott_Sauyet]

@Springer

The suggestion that Kant might be a familiar example (even for most academics) is pretty hilarious.

Well, I wasn’t thinking of the articles themselves as familiar. I think academia is too fragented for anything, especially anything modern, to be widely familiar. So I tried to think of names that would be familiar, but stuff that’s old enough not to raise too many modern objections. (That is, not global warming, nor even Darwin.) I thought of Einstein without coming up with a particular title, but also thought of The Critique of Pure Reason; I could have made them parallel by looking up an Einstein title, but this seemed simpler.

In any case, the idea would be to show a wiki modeling notes for an article, novel, essay, etc. I have no problem imagining that for a novel, and specifically, I could easily see having fun with imagining Lewis Carrol’s notes as he’s developing Alice.

title: Queen of Diamonds
tags: Character
alternate-names: [[Queen of Hearts]] [[Red Queen]]
catch-phrase: [[Off with (his/her/their) head(s)!]]

The Queen is the most scary of Alice's obstacles.  Although
most of her sentences aren't carried out (Why? A compassionate
King?  Wily subjects? Something else?), one cannot be sure.

''Important'':  don't make the parallels to Victoria too obvious!

I'm starting to think that "Queen of Hearts" is a better name.
Diamonds are striking, but too cold and distant.  While "Red Queen"
is a great name, I think it would be better to save that for a future
project.

I think Alice should play [[Croquet]] with the Queen.  But how do
I make the game both familiar and absurd?

I have much less sense of how we might do something like that for any sort of academic article.

@Springer

For my part, in the absence of some other immediate interest, I would not be close to signing up to animate Kant, or any other existing philosophical system, with a TiddlyWiki project.

Well, when you put it like that, it does seem a fair bit of work! I might have a go at Alice, partly because these are supposed to be a point-in-time example, and I can simply leave off wherever seems convenient. But on the other hand, as I haven’t used TW for notes on writing, I might not be a particularly good choice for doing this.