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At my new place of work we need to use alot of standards documents. I am finding the non-linked nature of MsWord and Adobe rather annoying, and so I would like to make each Document a WikiTopic, and anywhere that a standard document is meantioned make that a link.

this leads to the problem of DomainSpecificTopicNames (thats probably a better name for this topic :). In the same way that we have named links that are defined on a certain page, for that page only, we could have a registry of DomainSpecificTopicNames. Whenever they appear in a Topic the rendering engine can make them a wikipage.. Aliasing could also be done, and it can be used to reference external documents.

therefore, instead of requiring useres to mark up domain specific term to force them to be a WikiTopic, they can just add the term to the DomainSpecificTopicNames registry. (This sounds like a plug-in with a WikiTopic as a configuration page.)

-- SvenDowideit - 01 May 2001

I don't understand. Can you explain in a different way? Thanks, M.

-- MartinCleaver - 02 May 2001

mmmm, I want to suck in lots of existing documents that contain words like IEC 61174, s-57 and other names. Everywhere these get used i want them to link to that document (wiki style). But, there is no way i am going to edit them to mark them as WikiTopics. So I thought I could wet up a table of the style

Document Text WikiPage
IEC 61174 ECDISStandard
IHO http://www.iho.something

this table would be on a wikipage, and the addin would use this info when it creates the HTML to display.

-- SvenDowideit - 02 May 2001

An alternative approach could be:

  • Relax linking rules so that any matching text in a topic is linked
  • Allow special Webs to always be in scope. If Special is such a Web and contains topic Agent, then the text Agent in any Web would (that didn't contain a topic Agent) would be linked
  • Add meta tag for "redirection" in a topic.

So the above example would become something like:

  • Have Web Refs
  • Have topic Refs.IEC_61174
  • IEC_61174 would contain something like =%META:REF{topic="ECDISStandard"}% - an alias
  • IHO would contain something =%META:REF{url="http://www.iho.something"}%
  • Or topic could be a normal topic

-- JohnTalintyre - 04 May 2001

  • Relaxing the linking rules is starting to become a real issue for me at work. WikiWordForSingleWord would help, but that doesn't help for terms such as e-business.
  • What you are saying about Special webs is what I was saying in ImportingContexts.
  • Instead of redirection, how about a GetHtmlBody routine that could be called from INCLUDEWEBBODY? This could suck in the contents of that page and have it display in situ. The advantage of this is that you could then comment on the page.

-- MartinCleaver - 04 May 2001

It seems to me that both your suggestions are really, really complex ways of acheiving what i described, and that the addin that I was thinking of with one configuration page might be a simple way to solve the things that you want too..

-- SvenDowideit - 04 May 2001

Whilst the changes I describe above are no trivial, I don't think they are that complex.

  1. Let any text match, is also referred to in SingletonWikiWord - i.e. match to a topic if it exists. I would think this is best done by read Web into a hash.
  2. A reference to another page or site is not so different to using the %INCLUDE% variable. So I feel my suggestion is close to the way things currently work.

-- JohnTalintyre - 05 May 2001

you got me smile By complex, I mean the markup that the user needs to write to add a new topic alias. I think that a lookup table that is written in the form of a table and displays as one is simpler (to use) than an %INCLUDE% like mechanism. Similarly, i would prefer to set up my aliases in one place.

Please note that I am a luddite - I am not too fond to having multiple webs as i think it segments the topics - and i like the cross-polination thing too much..

-- SvenDowideit - 05 May 2001

Points well made. Would it be confusing to have both options?

-- JohnTalintyre - 06 May 2001

Good QUestion, but i have no-idea smile my philosophy dies when presented with flattery and options smile What do other's think ???

-- SvenDowideit - 06 May 2001

Okay, now I think I understand what you are suggesting. You would make not be making phrases such as 'e-business' or "IEC 61174" WikiWords, but rather phrases that would be searched for, displayed the as same but have linked to the associated target. I vote this is a good idea, and we consider that it works across a whole web instead of just a single topic, (though this will come out in the wash - WhatDifferenceBetweenATopicAndAWeb)

Instinctively I dislike linking straight to another site using a wiki phrase as it looses the facility for people to comment on that link.

I don't like the Special webs thing. I would vote that we implemented something more general as in ImportingContexts.

See also MultipleWebs

-- MartinCleaver - 07 May 2001

mmm, I don't completely get it. On the one hand we have seperation of information using MultipleWebs, and then you want to combine them again by linking their Topics. (Thus removing the only remaining problem i have with MultipleWebs..). Once you do that, why do you still want MultipleWebs?

I did mean that the Defined Links should be Web Wide as that is the only way that I can see that we can import a document directly from txt|doc|tex|cpp etc without needing to modify it. Also, it might be possible to WikiMarkup %IMPORTED% external html pages...

-- SvenDowideit - 08 May 2001

Another approach to this problem is to use the Plugins.InterwikiPlugin, which makes it easy to generate links to other Wikis, e.g. Wiki:WelcomeVisitors points to the original Wiki's WelcomeVisitors page - some other Wiki clones have already extended their Interwiki feature to handle 'ISBN 12345678', with various syntaxes, linking to an online bookseller, so it seems reasonable to take the InterWikis approach a bit further.

Why not just have an InterWikis style topic in the Plugins web that has rules on how to transform a given pattern (if general rule, e.g. IEC 99999 type format) into a link? (AndreaSterbini suggested this a while back.) Sven's original suggestion of a table is a bit like the Interwiki approach, but one-to-one (i.e. one table entry per linked document) - useful for exceptions not covered by the general rule. With this combined approach you could link directly to external pages/documents, or go via an intermediate TWiki page to allow commenting - this is mainly a stylistic issue, and shouldn't be mandated by TWiki IMO.

This sort of automatic linking feature is very useful and was discussed further in AbsoluteWikization recently.

-- RichardDonkin - 09 Jun 2001

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